The Girl in the Tower

6. The Ends of the Earth

Some weeks earlier, a girl sat on a bay horse at the edge of a fir-grove. Snow slanted down, catching in her eyelashes and the horse’s mane. In the fir-grove stood a house, with an open doorway.

The figure of a man waited in the gap. The firelight behind emptied the man’s eyes and filled his face with shadows.

“Come in, Vasya,” he said. “It is cold.” Could the snow-laden night speak, it might have spoken with that voice.

The girl drew breath to reply, but the stallion had already started forward. Deeper in the fir-grove, the branches twined too thick for the girl to ride. Stiffly, she slid to the ground, and staggered as pain shot through her half-frozen feet. Only a fierce effort, clinging to the horse’s mane, kept her from falling. “Mother of God,” she muttered.

She tripped over a root, lurched to the threshold, stumbled again, and would have fallen, but the man in the doorway caught her. Close in, his eyes were no longer black, but the palest of blues: ice on a clear day. “Fool,” he said after a pause, holding her upright. “Thrice a fool, Vasilisa Petrovna. But come in.” He set her on her feet.

Vasilisa—Vasya—opened her mouth, once more thought better of it, and stepped across the threshold, swaying like a foal.

The house resembled a stand of fir-trees that had decided to become a house for the night but gone about it badly. A livid darkness, as of clouds and fitful moonlight, filled the space near the rafters. The shadows of branches swooped back and forth across the floor, though the walls seemed solid enough.

But one thing was certain: the far end of the house held a vast Russian oven. Vasya stumbled toward it like a blind girl, stripped off her mittens, put her hands near the blaze, and shuddered at the heat on her cold fingers. Beside the oven stood a tall white mare, licking at some salt. This mare nuzzled Vasya briefly in greeting. Vasya, smiling, laid her cheek against the mare’s nose.

Vasilisa Petrovna was no beauty as her people counted it. Too tall, the women had said when she came of age. Far too tall. As for a figure, she has scarce more than a boy.

Mouth like a frog, her stepmother had added, with spite. What man would take a girl with that chin? And as for her eyes—

In truth, the stepmother could not find words for Vasya’s eyes—green and deep and set far apart—nor for her long black plait that strong sunlight would spark with red.

“No beauty, perhaps,” echoed Vasya’s nurse, who had loved her very much. “No beauty, my girl—but she draws the eye. Like her grandmother.” The old lady always crossed herself when she said it, for Vasya’s grandmother had not died happily.

Vasya’s stallion plowed his way into the house behind her and looked about with a proprietary air. The hours in the frozen forest had not quenched him. He went at once to the girl by the oven. The white mare, his dam, snorted softly at him.

Vasya smiled, scratching the stallion’s withers. He wore neither saddle nor bridle. “That was bravely done,” she murmured. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever find it.”

The horse shook his mane complacently.

Vasya, grateful for the horse’s buoyant strength, drew her belt-knife and bent to dig the balled-up ice from his hooves.

A spiteful winter gust slammed the door.

Vasya jerked upright; the stallion snorted. With the door shut, the storm was set at remove, and yet, somehow, tree-shadows still swung across the floor.

The master of the house stood an instant, facing the door, and then he turned. Snowflakes starred his hair. All around him was the same soundless force as that of the snow falling outside.

The stallion’s ears eased back.

“Doubtless you mean to tell me, Vasya,” said the man, “why you have risked your life a third time, running into the deep woods in winter.” He crossed the floor, light as smoke, until he stood in the light cast by the oven, and she could see his face.

Vasya swallowed. The master of the house looked like a man, but his eyes betrayed him. When he had first walked in that forest, the maidens called to him in a different tongue.

Vasya thought, If you start being afraid of him, you will never stop, straightened her back—and found that her reply would not come. Grief and weariness had driven words out, and she could only stand, throat working: an interloper in a house that was not there.

The frost-demon added drily, “Well? Were the flowers unsatisfactory? Are you looking for the firebird this time? The horse with the golden mane?”

“Why do you think I am here?” Vasya managed, stung into speech. She had bidden her brother and sister farewell that very night. Her father’s grave lay raw in the frozen earth, and her sister’s furious sobs had followed her into the forest. “I could not stay home. ‘Witch-woman,’ the people whispered. There are those who would burn me if they could. Father—” Her voice wavered. “Father is not there to check them.”

“Such a sad story,” the frost-demon replied, unmoved. “I have seen ten thousand sadder, yet you are the only one to come stumbling to my doorstep because of it.” He bent nearer. The firelight beat on his pale face. “Do you mean to stay with me now? Is that it? Be a snow-maiden in this forest that never changes?”

The question was half gibe, half invitation, and full of a tender mockery.

Vasya flushed and recoiled. “Never!” Her hands had begun to warm, but her lips felt stiff and clumsy. “What would I do in this house in the fir-grove? I am going away. That is why I left home—I am going far away. Solovey will take me to the ends of the earth. I will see palaces and cities and rivers in summer, and I will look at the sun on the sea.” She had unfastened her sheepskin hood, almost stammering in her eagerness. The fire threw flashes of red across her black hair.

His eyes darkened, seeing it, though Vasya did not notice. As though speaking had loosed a torrent, now she found her tongue. “You showed me there is more in this world than the church and the bathhouse and my father’s forests. I want to see it.” Her vivid gaze saw beyond him. “I want to see it all. There is nothing for me at Lesnaya Zemlya.”

The frost-demon might have been taken aback. Certainly he turned away from her and sank into a chair like a broken oak-stump, there by the fire, before he asked, “What are you doing here, then?” His pointed glance took in the shadows near the ceiling, the vast bed heaped like a snowdrift, the Russian oven, the hangings on the walls, the carven table. “I see no palaces and no cities, and certainly not the sun on the sea.”

It was her turn to pause. The color came to her face. “Once you offered me a dowry…” she began.

Indeed, the bundles still lay heaped in one corner: fine cloth and gems, strewn like a serpent’s hoard. His glance followed hers and he smiled, coldly. “You spurned it and ran away, as I recall.”

“Because I do not wish to marry,” Vasya finished. The words sounded strange even as she said them. A woman married. Or she became a nun. Or she died. That was what being a woman meant. What, then, was she? “But I do not want to beg my bread in churches. I came to ask— May I take a little of that gold with me, when I ride away?”

Startled silence. Then Morozko leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, incredulity in his voice, “You have come here, where no one has ever come without my consent, to beg a little gold for your wanderings?”

No, she might have said. It is not that. Not entirely. I was afraid when I left home, and I wanted you. You know more than I, and you have been kind to me. But she could not bring herself to say it.

“Well,” said Morozko, sitting back. “All that is yours.” He jerked his chin at the heap of treasure. “You may go to the ends of the earth dressed as a princess, with gold to plait into Solovey’s mane.”

When she didn’t answer, he added, with elaborate courtesy, “Would you like a cart for it? Or will Solovey drag it all behind you, like beads on a string?”

She clung to her dignity. “No,” she said. “Only what can easily be carried and will not attract thieves.”

Morozko’s pale stare, unimpressed, swept her from tousled hair to booted feet. Vasya tried not to think how she must appear to him: a hollow-eyed child, her face pale and dirty. “And then what?” the frost-demon asked meditatively. “You stuff your pockets with gold, ride out tomorrow morning, and freeze to death at once? No? Or perhaps you will live a few days until someone kills you for your horse, or rapes you for your green eyes? You know nothing of this world, and now you mean to go out and die in it?”

“What else am I to do?” Vasya retorted. Tears of bewildered exhaustion gathered, though she did not let them fall. “My own people will kill me if I go home. Shall I become a nun? No—I cannot bear it. Better to die on the road.”

“Many people say ‘Better to die’ until the time comes to do it,” Morozko returned. “Do you want to die alone in some forest hollow? Go back to Lesnaya Zemlya. Your people will forget, I swear it. All will be as it was. Go home and let your brother protect you.”

Sudden anger burned out Vasya’s gathering hurt. She pushed back her chair and stood again. “I am not a dog,” she snapped. “You may tell me to go home, but I may choose not to. Do you think that is all I want, in all my life—a royal dowry, and a man to force his children into me?”

Morozko was scarce taller than she, yet she had to hold herself to stillness before his pale, scathing stare. “You are talking like a child. Do you think that anyone, in all this world of yours, cares what you want? Even princes do not have what they want, and neither do maidens. There is no life for you on the road, nothing but death, soon or late.”

Vasya bit her lips. “Do you think that I—” she began hotly, but the stallion had lost patience, hearing the fierce anguish in her voice. He thrust his head over her shoulder and his teeth snapped a finger’s breadth from Morozko’s face.

“Solovey!” Vasya cried. “What are you—?” She tried shoving him out of the way, but he would not go.

I’ll bite him, the stallion said. His tail lashed his sides; one hoof scraped the wooden floor.

“He’d bleed water, and turn you into a snow horse,” said Vasya, still shoving. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Go away, you ox,” Morozko advised the stallion.

Solovey did not move for a moment, but then Vasya said, “Go on.” He met her eye, flicked his tongue in halfhearted apology, and turned away.

The tension had broken. Morozko sighed a little. “No, I should not have spoken so.” Some of the nasty edge had gone from his voice. He sank once more into his chair. Vasya did not move. “But—the house in the fir-grove is no place for you now, much less the road. You shouldn’t have been able to find the house anymore, even with Solovey, not after—” He met her eyes, broke off, resumed. “There, among your own kind, that is the world for you. I left you safely bestowed with your brother, the Bear asleep, the priest fled into the forest. Could you not have been satisfied with that?” His question was almost plaintive.

“No,” said Vasya. “I am going on. I will see the world beyond this forest, and I will not count the cost.”

A silence. Then he laughed, softly and unwillingly. “Well done, Vasilisa Petrovna. I have never been gainsaid in my own house before.”

It is high time, then, she thought, though she did not say it aloud. Had something changed about him since that night he flung her across his saddlebow to keep her from the Bear? What was it? Were his eyes bluer now? Some new clarity in the bones of his face?

Vasya felt suddenly shy. A fresh silence fell. In the pause, all her weariness seemed to strike, as though it had waited for her to let down her guard. She leaned hard against the table to steady herself.

He saw it and got to his feet. “Sleep here, tonight. Mornings are wiser than evenings.”

“I can’t sleep.” She meant it, though the table was the only thing keeping her upright. An edge of horror crept into her voice. “The Bear is waiting in my dreams, and Dunya, and Father. I’d rather stay awake.”

She could smell the winter night on his skin. “That at least I can give you,” he said. “A night of sleep untroubled.”

She hesitated, exhausted, untrusting. His hands could give sleep, of a kind. But it was a strange, thick sleep, a cousin to death. She could feel him watching her.

“No,” he said suddenly. “No.” The roughness in his voice startled her. “No, I will not touch you. Sleep as you may. I will see you in the morning.”

He turned away, spoke a soft word to his horse. She did not turn until she heard the sound of hoofbeats, and when she did, Morozko and his white mare were gone.

MOROZKO’S SERVANTS WERE NOT invisible—not exactly. Out of the corner of her eye, Vasya would sometimes catch a whisking movement, or a dark shape. If she were quick, she might turn and get the impression of a face: seamed as oak-bark or cherry-cheeked or mushroom-gray and scowling. But Vasya never saw them when she was looking for them. They moved between one breath and the next, between one blink and another.

After Morozko disappeared, these servants laid out food for her while she sat in a weary haze—rough bread and porridge, shriveled apples. A glorious bowl of wintergreen berries, wintergreen leaves. Honey-wine and beer and achingly cold water. “Thank you,” said Vasya to the listening air.

She ate what she could, in her weariness, and fed her bread-crusts to the gluttonous Solovey. When she finally pushed her bowl away, she found that the coals in the oven had been scraped out and that they had made a steam-bath for her.

Vasya stripped off her clammy clothes and crawled in at once, grinding the bones of her knees against the brick. Once inside, she turned over, with ash on her stomach, and lay looking up at nothing.

In winter it is almost impossible to be still. Even sitting by the fire, one is watching the coals, stirring the soup, fighting—always fighting—the eager frost. But in the singing heat, the soft breath of the steam, Vasya’s breath slowed, and slowed again, until she lay quiet in the darkness and the frigid knot of grief inside her loosened. She lay on her back, open-eyed, and the tears ran down her temples, to mingle with her sweat.

When Vasya could not bear it anymore she ran outside naked and flung herself, shrieking, into a snowbank. When she came back in, she quivered, fiercely, defiantly alive, and calmer than she’d been since the season turned.

Morozko’s unseen servants had left out a gown for her, long and loose and light. She put it on, crawled into the great bed, with its coverlets like blown snow, and was at once asleep.

AS SHE HAD FEARED, Vasya dreamed, and her dreams were not kind.

She did not dream of the Bear, or of her dead father, or her stepmother with her throat torn away. Instead she wandered lost, in a narrow darkened place, smelling dust and cold incense, the moonlight seeping in. She wandered a long time, tripping over her own dress, and always she heard a woman weeping just beyond her sight.

“Why are you crying?” Vasya called. “Where are you?”

There was no answer but weeping. Far ahead, Vasya thought she saw a white figure. She hurried toward it. “Wait—”

The white figure whirled.

Vasya recoiled before its bone-white flesh, the shriveled pits of its eyes, and the mouth too large, wide and black. The mouth gaped; the creature croaked, “Not you! Never—Go! Get out! Leave me alone—Leave me—”

Vasya fled, hands over her ears, and jolted, gasping, awake to find herself in the house in the fir-grove with the morning light filtering in. The pine-scented air of the winter morning chilled her face but could not pierce the snow-colored covers on the bed. Her strength had returned in the night. A dream, she thought, breath coming fast. Just a dream.

A hoof scraped on wood, and a large, whiskered nose thrust itself against hers.

“Go away,” Vasya said to Solovey, and pulled the blanket over her head. “Go away now. It is ridiculous for a creature of your size to act like a dog.”

Solovey, undeterred, threw his head up and down. He snorted his warm breath into her face. It is day, he informed her. Get up! He shook his mane and set his teeth to the covers and tugged. Vasya snatched, too late, yelped, and came upright laughing.

“Idiot,” she said. But she did get to her feet. Her hair had come loose of its plait and hung around her body; her head was clear, her body light. The ache of grief and anger and bad dreams lay muted in the back of her mind. She could shake away nightmares and smile at the beauty of the unmarked morning, the sunlight slanting in and stippling the floor.

Solovey, recalling his dignity, sauntered back to the oven. Vasya’s gaze followed him. A little of the laughter died in her throat. Morozko and the white mare had returned in the dark before dawn.

The mare stood quietly, chewing at her hay. Morozko was staring into the fire and did not turn his head when she rose. Vasya thought of the long featureless years of his life, wondered how many nights he sat alone by a fire, or if he wandered the wild instead and made his dwelling seem to have a roof and walls and a fire only to please her.

She went to the stove. Morozko looked round then, and a little of the remoteness left his face.

She flushed suddenly. Her hair was a witchy mass, her feet bare. Perhaps he saw it, for his glance withdrew abruptly. “Nightmares?” he asked.

Vasya bristled, and shyness vanished in indignation. “No,” she replied, with dignity. “I slept perfectly well.”

He lifted a brow.

“Have you a comb?” she asked, to divert him.

He looked taken aback. She supposed he wasn’t used to guests at all, much less the sort whose hair tangled, who got hungry or had bad dreams. But then he half-smiled and reached a hand for the floor.

The floor was wood. Of course it was—wood smooth-planed and dark. But when he straightened, Morozko nonetheless held a handful of snow. He breathed on it once, and the snow became ice.

Vasya bent nearer, fascinated. His long, thin fingers shaped the ice as though it were clay. In his face was an odd light, the joy of creation. After a few minutes, he held a comb that looked as though it had been carved from diamonds. The back of it was shaped like a horse, long mane streaming along its straining neck.

Morozko handed it to Vasya. The coarse hair of the beast’s back, done in ice-crystals, scraped on her calloused fingertips.

She turned the lovely thing over and over in her fingers. “Will it break?” It lay cool as stone and perfect in her hand.

He sat back. “No.”

Tentatively, she began to work at the snarls. The comb slid like water down the whorls of her hair, pulling them smooth. She thought he might be watching her, though whenever she looked, his glance was fixed on the fire. At the end, when her hair was smooth-plaited, wound with a little strip of leather, Vasya said, “Thank you,” and the comb melted to water in her hand.

She was still staring at the place where it had lain when he said, “It is little enough. Eat, Vasya.”

She had not seen his servants come, but now the table held porridge, golden with honey and yellow with butter, and a wooden bowl. She sat down, heaped the bowl with steaming porridge, and tore into it, making up for the night before.

“Where do you mean to go?” he asked her as she ate.

Vasya blinked. Away. She had not thought further than away.

“South,” she said slowly. As she spoke, she knew her answer. Her heart leaped. “I wish to see the churches of Tsargrad, and look upon the sea.”

“South, then,” he said, oddly agreeable. “It is a long way. Do not press Solovey too hard. He is stronger than a mortal horse, but he is young.”

Vasya glanced at him in some surprise, but his face revealed nothing. She turned toward the horses. Morozko’s white mare stood composedly. Solovey had already eaten his hay, with a good measure of barley, and was now edging back to the table, one eye fixed on her porridge. She began eating rapidly, to forestall him.

Not looking at Morozko, she asked, “Will you ride with me, a little way?” Her question came out in a rush, and she regretted it as soon as she voiced it.

“Ride at your side, nurse you with pap, and keep the snow off at night?” he asked, sounding amused. “No. Even if I had not other things to do, I would not. Go out into the world, traveler. See what the long nights and hard days feel like, after a week of them.”

“Perhaps I will like them,” Vasya retorted, with spirit.

“I sincerely hope not.”

She would not dignify that with an answer. Vasya put a little more porridge in the bowl and let Solovey lick it up.

“You will have him fat as a broodmare at this rate,” Morozko remarked.

Solovey’s ears eased back, but he did not relinquish the porridge.

“He needs filling out,” Vasya protested. “Besides, he’ll work it off, on the road.”

Morozko said, “Well, if you are set on this, then I have a gift for you.”

She followed his glance. Two bulging saddlebags lay on the floor beneath the table. She did not reach for them. “Why? My great dowry is lying in that corner, and surely a little gold will buy all that is needful.”

“Naturally you can use the gold of your dowry,” Morozko returned coolly. “If you intend to ride into a city you do not know, where you can purchase things you have never seen, riding your war-stallion and dressed as a Russian princess. You may wear the white furs and scarlet if you like, so that no thief in Rus’ will be the poorer.”

Vasya lifted her chin. “I prefer green to scarlet,” she said coldly. “But perhaps you are right.” She put a hand to the saddlebags—then paused. “You saved my life in the forest,” she said. “You offered me a dowry; you came when I asked you to rid us of the priest. Now this. What do you want of me in return, Morozko?”

He seemed to hesitate, just an instant. “Think of me sometimes,” he returned. “When the snowdrops have bloomed and the snow has melted.”

“Is that all?” she asked, and then added, with wry honesty, “How could I forget?”

“It is easier than you would think. Also—” He reached out.

Startled, Vasya kept perfectly still, though her traitorous blood rushed out to her skin when his hand brushed her collarbone. A silver-backed sapphire hung round her neck; Morozko hooked a finger beneath its chain and drew it forth. This jewel had been a gift from her father, given to her by her nurse before she died. Of all Vasya’s possessions, the sapphire was her most prized.

Morozko held the jewel up between them. It threw pale icicle-light across his fingers. “You will promise me,” he said, “to wear this always, no matter the circumstances.” He let the necklace fall.

The brush of his hand seemed to linger, raw on her skin. Vasya ignored it angrily. He was not real, after all. He was alone, unknowable, a creature of black wood and pale sky. What had he said?

“Why?” she asked. “My nurse gave it me. A gift from my father.”

“It is a talisman, that thing,” Morozko said. He spoke as though he were choosing his words. “It may be some protection.”

“Protection from what?” she asked. “And why do you care?”

“Contrary to what you believe, I do not want to come for you, dead in some hollow,” he returned coldly. A breeze, soft and bone-chilling, filtered through the room. “Will you deny me this?”

“No,” said Vasya. “I meant to wear it anyway.” She bit her lip and turned away a little too quickly to untie the flap of the first saddlebag.

It held clothing: a wolfskin cloak, a leather hood, a rabbit-fur cap, felt-and-fur boots, trousers lined with fleece. The other held food: dried fish and bread baked hard, a skin of honey-wine, a knife, and a pot for water. Everything she would need for hard travel in a cold country. Vasya stared down at these things with a delight she had never felt for the gold or gems of her dowry. These things were freedom; Vasilisa Petrovna, Pyotr’s highborn daughter, would never have owned such things. They belonged to someone else, someone more capable and more strange. She looked up at Morozko, face alight. Perhaps he understood her better than she’d thought.

“Thank you,” Vasya said. “I—thank you.”

He inclined his head but did not speak.

She didn’t care. With the skins came a saddle of no kind that she had ever seen before, little more than a padded cloth. Vasya leaped up eagerly, already calling to Solovey, the saddle in one hand.

BUT SADDLING THE HORSE was not so easy. Solovey had never worn a saddle—even this skin that passed for one—and did not like it much.

“You need it!” Vasya finally burst out, exasperated, after a good deal of fruitless sidling about the fir-grove. So much for the brave and self-sufficient wanderer, she thought. Solovey was no nearer to being saddled than when they began. Morozko was watching from the doorway. His amused glance bored into her back.

“What will happen if we are going all day for weeks on end?” Vasya demanded of Solovey. “We’ll both be chafed raw, and besides, how will we hang the saddlebags? There is grain for you in there, too. Do you want to live on pine-needles?”

Solovey snorted and shot a covert glance at the saddlebags.

“Fine,” Vasya said through gritted teeth. “You can just go back to wherever you came from, and I’ll walk.” She started toward the house.

Solovey lunged and blocked her way.

Vasya gave him a glare and a shove, which had precisely no effect on the great oak-colored bulk. She crossed her arms and scowled. “Well, then,” she said, “what do you suggest?”

Solovey looked at her, then the saddlebags. His head drooped. Oh, very well, he said, without much grace.

Vasya carefully did not look at Morozko as she finished making ready.

SHE LEFT THAT SAME MORNING, under a sun that burned away the mist and set diamonds in the fresh-fallen snow. The world outside the fir-grove seemed large and formless, faintly menacing. “I don’t feel like a traveler now,” Vasya admitted, low, to Morozko. They stood together outside the fir-grove. Solovey waited, neatly saddled, with an expression caught between eagerness and irritation, disliking the saddlebags on his back.

“Neither do travelers, often enough,” the frost-demon returned. Unexpectedly, he put both hands on her fur-clad shoulders. Their eyes met. “Stay in the forest. That is safest. Avoid the dwellings of men, and keep your fires small. If you speak to anyone, say you are a boy. The world is not kind to girls alone.”

Vasya nodded. Words trembled on her lips. She could not read his expression.

He sighed. “May you have joy in your wanderings. Now go, Vasya.”

He boosted her into the saddle, and then she was looking down at him. Suddenly he seemed less a man than a man-shaped confluence of shadows. There was something in his face she did not understand.

She opened her mouth to speak again.

“Go!” he said, and slapped Solovey’s quarters. The horse snorted and spun and they were away over the snow.

7. Traveler

Thus Vasilisa Petrovna, murderer, savior, lost child, rode away from the house in the fir-grove. The first day ran on as an adventure might, with home behind and the whole world before them. As the hours passed, Vasya’s mood went from apprehensive to giddy, and she pushed the sour remains of loss and confusion to the back of her mind. No distance could stand before Solovey’s steady stride. Before half a day was gone, she was further from home than she’d ever been: every hollow and elm and snowy stump new to her. Vasya rode, and when she grew cold, she walked, while Solovey jogged with impatience.

So the day wore on, until the winter sun tilted west.

Just at dusk, they came upon a great spruce, with snow mounded up all around its trunk. By then, the twilight had blued the snow and it was bitterly cold.

“Here?” Vasya said, sliding down from the horse’s back. Her nose and fingers ached. Standing upright, she realized how stiff she was, and how weary.

The horse twitched his ears and raised his head. It smells safe.

A childhood running wild in a country with a seven-month winter had taught Vasya how to keep herself alive in the forest. But her heart failed a little, suddenly, at the thought of this freezing night all alone and the next and the next. She blew her nose. You chose this, she reminded herself. You are a traveler now.

The shadows draped the forest like hands; the light was all blue-violet and nothing looked quite real. “We’ll stay here,” Vasya said, pulling off Solovey’s saddle, with more confidence than she felt. “I am going to make a fire. Make sure nothing comes to eat us.”

Laboring, she dug the snow away from the tree, until she had a snow-cave under the spruce-branches and a patch of bare dirt for her fire. The winter twilight ran swiftly to night, in the way of the north, and it was full dark before she had chopped enough firewood. In the starlit dark, before moonrise, she also cut fringed limbs off the spruce as her brother once showed her, and planted them in the snow, to reflect heat toward her shelter.

She had been making fires since her hands could grip the flints, but she had to take her mittens off to do it, and her hands grew very cold.

The tinder caught at last; the flames roared up. When she crawled into her new-dug shelter, she found it cold, but bearable. Water boiled with pine needles warmed her; black bread toasted with hard cheese eased her hunger. She burned her fingers, and charred her dinner, but it was done at last, and she was proud.

Afterward, heartened by the food and the warmth, Vasya dug a trench in the fire-softened earth, filled it with coals from her fire, and made a platform of pine-boughs above it. She lay down on this platform, wrapped in her cloak and rabbit-lined bedroll, and was delighted to find herself more or less warm. Solovey was dozing already, his ears turning this way and that as he listened to the nighttime forest.

Vasya’s eyelids drooped; she was young and weary. Sleep was not far off.

It was then that she heard a laugh overhead.

Solovey’s head jerked up.

Vasya floundered to her feet, groping for her belt-knife. Were those eyes, shining in the darkness?

Vasya did not call—she was no fool—but she stared up into the spruce-branches until her eyes watered. Her little knife lay cold and pitifully small in her hand.

Silence. Had she imagined it?

Then the laugh came again. Vasya backed up, noiselessly, and picked up a burning log from the fire, holding it low.

Thump, she heard. Thump again—and then a woman dropped into the snow at the foot of the fir-tree.

Or not a woman. For this creature’s hair and eyes were ghost-pale, her glossy skin the color of winter midnight. She wore a sleep-colored cloak, but her head and arms and feet were bare. The firelight played red on her strange and lovely face, and the cold did not seem to trouble her. Child? Woman? Chyert. Some night-spirit. Vasya was at once relieved and more wary still.

“Grandmother?” she said cautiously. She lowered her burning brand. “You are welcome at my fire.”

The chyert straightened up. Her eyes were remote and pale as stars, but her mouth quirked, merry as a child’s. “A courteous traveler,” she said lightly. “I should have expected it. Put the log away, child; you won’t need it. Yes, I will sit by your fire, Vasilisa Petrovna.” So saying, she dropped into the snow beside the flames and looked Vasya up and down. “Come!” she said. “I have come to visit; you could at least offer me wine.”

Vasya, after a little hesitation, handed her visitor her skin of mead. She was not foolish enough to offend a creature that seemed to have tumbled from the sky. But—“You know my name, Grandmother,” Vasya ventured. “I do not know yours.”

The expression of the smiling mouth did not change. “I am called Polunochnitsa,” she said, drinking.

Vasya jerked back in alarm. Solovey, watching, pinned his ears. Vasya’s nurse, Dunya, had told tales of two demon-sisters, Midnight and Midday, and none of those stories ended well for lonely travelers. “Why are you here?” Vasya asked, breathing fast.

Midnight laughed to herself, lounging in the snow beside the fire. “Peace, child,” she said. “You will need steadier nerves than that, if you are going to be a traveler.” Vasya saw, with disquiet, that Midnight had a great number of teeth. “I was sent to look at you.”

“Sent—?” Vasya asked. Slowly, she sank back onto her own seat beside the fire. “Who sent you?”

“The more one knows, the sooner one grows old,” Midnight returned cheerfully.

Vasya asked, hesitating, “Was it Morozko?”

Midnight snorted, to Vasya’s chagrin. “Do not give him so much credit. Poor winter-king could never command me.” Her eyes seemed to give light of themselves.

“Who, then?” asked Vasya.

The demon put a finger to her lips. “Ah, that I cannot say, for I swore not. Besides, where is the mystery there?”

Midnight had drunk her fill; now she tossed the skin to Vasya and got to her feet. The firelight shone red through her moon-white hair. “Well, I have seen you once,” she said. “Thrice, I promised, so we will have another chance. Ride far, Vasilisa Petrovna.”

She disappeared from the sheltering fir-branches while Vasya was still asking questions. “I don’t—wait—” But the chyert was gone. Vasya could have sworn she heard a horse that was not Solovey snorting in the cold, and also the steady clop of great hooves. But she saw nothing. Then silence.

Vasya sat by the fire until it was only hot embers, listening, but no new sound disturbed the nighttime quiet. At last she persuaded herself to lie down once more and go to sleep. She surprised herself by falling immediately and blackly unconscious, and woke only at dawn, when Solovey thrust his head into her shelter and blew snow into her face.

Vasya smiled at the horse, rubbed her eyes, drank a little hot water, saddled him, and rode away.

DAYS PASSED—A WEEK—ANOTHER. The road was hard, and very cold. Not all Vasya’s days—or her nights—were as well organized as the first. She saw no strangers and the midnight-demon did not come back, but she still bruised herself on branches, burned her fingers, scorched her dinner, and let herself grow chilled, so that she must huddle all night beside the fire, too cold to sleep. Then she actually caught a cold, so that she spent two days shivering and choking on her own breath.

But the versts rushed beneath Solovey’s hooves and fell away behind them. South they went and south more, angling west, and when Vasya said, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” the horse ignored her.

On the third day of Vasya’s cold, when she rode doggedly, head down, her nose a brilliant red, the trees ended.

Or rather, a great river thrust its way between them. The light on a vast stretch of snow dazzled Vasya’s swollen eyes when they came to the edge of the wood and looked out. “This must be the sledge-road,” she whispered, blinking at the expanse of snow-covered ice. “The Volga,” she added, remembering her eldest brother’s stories. A sloping snowbank, with trees half-buried in the deep drifts stretched down to the sledge-tracked snow.

Faintly, Vasya heard the tinkling of bells, and then a line of sleighs piled high came around a bend. Bells hung on the bright harness of horses, and lumpish strangers, bundled to the eyes, came riding or running beside them, shouting back and forth.

Vasya watched them pass, entranced. The men’s faces—what she could see of them—were red and rough, with great bristling beards. Their mittened hands lay sure on the leads of their horses. The beasts were all smaller than Solovey, stocky and coarse-maned. The caravan dazzled Vasya with its speed and its bells and the faces of strangers. She had been born in a small village, where strangers were vanishingly rare, and every soul was known to her.

Then Vasya raised her eyes, following the line of sledges. The haze of many fires showed over the trees. More fires than she had ever seen together. “Is that Moscow?” she asked Solovey, her breath coming short.

No, said the horse. Moscow is bigger.

“How do you know?”

The horse only tilted an ear in a superior fashion. Vasya sneezed. More people appeared on the sledge-road at her feet: riders this time, wearing scarlet caps, with embroidery on their boots. A great mass of smoke hung like clouds above the skeleton trees. “Let’s go closer,” Vasya said. After a week in the wilderness, she craved color and motion, the sight of faces and the sound of a human voice.

We are safer in the forest, said Solovey, but his nostril crooked uncertainly.

“I mean to see the world,” Vasya retorted. “All the world is not forest.”

The horse shivered his skin.

Her voice dropped, coaxing. “We’ll be careful. If there is trouble, you can run away. Nothing can catch you; you are the fastest horse in the world. I want to see.”

When the horse still stood, undecided, she added, ingenuously, “Or are you afraid?”

Ignoble, perhaps, but it worked. Solovey tossed his head, and in two bounds he was on the ice. His hooves made a strange dull thud as they struck.

An hour and more they traveled the sledge-road while the smoke hovered tantalizingly ahead. Vasya, despite her bravado, was a little nervous to be seen by strangers, but she found herself ignored. Men lived too near the bone in winter to bother with things that did not concern them. One merchant, half-laughing, offered to buy her fine horse, but Vasya only shook her head and nudged Solovey on.

A clear sun hung high and remote in the winter-pale sky when they came around the last bend in the river and saw the town spread out before them.

As towns go, it was not a large one. A Tatar would have laughed and called it a village; even a Muscovite would have called it provincial. But it was far larger than any place Vasya had ever seen. Its wooden wall rose twice the height of Solovey’s shoulder, and its bell-tower stood up proudly, painted blue and ringed with smoke. The great, deep tolling came clear to Vasya’s ears. “Stop a moment,” she said to Solovey. “I want to listen.” Her eyes shone. She had never heard a bell in her life.

“That is not Moscow?” she asked again. “Are you sure?” It seemed a city to swallow the world; she had not dreamed that so many people could share so little space.

No, said Solovey. It is small, I think, to the eyes of men.

Vasya could not believe it. The bells rang again. She smelled stables and wood-smoke and birds roasting, faint in the cold. “I want to go in,” she said.

The horse snorted. You have seen it. There it is. The forest is better.

“I have never seen a city before,” she retorted. “I want to see this one.”

The horse pawed the snow, irritable.

“Just a little while,” she added meekly. “Please.”

Better not, said the horse, but Vasya could tell he had weakened.

Her eyes went once more to the smoke-wreathed towers. “Perhaps you should wait for me here. You’re a walking inducement to thieves.”

Solovey huffed. Absolutely not.

“I’m in much more danger with you than without you! What if someone decides to kill me so they can steal you?”

The horse put his head around angrily, biting at her ankle. Well, that was answer enough.

“Oh, very well,” Vasya said. She thought a moment more. “Let’s go; I have an idea.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER, the captain of the small, sleepy gate-guard of the town of Chudovo saw a boy coming toward him, dressed like a merchant’s lad and leading a big-boned young stallion.

The horse wore naught but a rope halter, and despite his long-limbed beauty he came ungainly up the ice, tripping over his own hooves. “Hey, boy!” called the captain. “What are you doing with that horse?”

“He is my father’s horse,” called the boy, a little shyly, with a rough, country accent. “I am to sell him.”

“You won’t get any price for that fumble-foot, this late in the day,” said the captain, just as the horse tripped again, nearly going to its knees. But even as he said it, he ran an automatic eye over the horse, noted the fine head, the short back, the long, clean limbs. A stallion. Perhaps he was only lame and would sire strong offspring. “I would buy him from you; save you some trouble,” he said, more slowly.

The merchant’s boy shook his head. He was slender and not above medium height: no hint of a beard. “Father would be angry,” said the boy. “I am to sell him in the city; that were his orders.”

The captain laughed to hear Chudovo referred to so earnestly as a city by this rustic. Perhaps not a merchant’s son but a boyar’s, the country-bred child of some minor lord. The captain shrugged. His glance had already leaped past the boy and his nag, out to a caravan of fur-merchants pushing their horses to reach the walls before dark.

“Well, get along, boy,” he said irritably. “What are you waiting for?”

The boy nodded stiffly and nudged his horse through the gate. Strange, the captain thought. A stallion as docile as that and wearing nothing but a halter. Well, the beast is lame, what do you expect?

Then the fur-merchants were there, shoving and shouting, and he put the boy from his mind.

THE STREETS WOUND FORWARD and back, stranger than the trackless forest. Vasya kept a negligent hold on the irritated Solovey’s lead-rope, trying (and mostly failing) to look unimpressed. Even the deadening effect of her cold could not erase the stink of hundreds of people. The smell of blood and beasts, offal and worse things, made her eyes water. Here were goats; there the church soared above her, its bell still ringing. Hurrying women jostled her, their bright heads wrapped in kerchiefs; sellers of pies thrust their good-smelling wares toward passersby. A forge steamed, its hammer beating counterpoint to the bell overhead while two men brawled in the snow, onlookers cheering them on.

Vasya pushed through it all, frightened and intrigued. People gave her space, mostly for Solovey, who appeared ready to kick anything that so much as brushed them in passing.

“You are making people nervous,” she told him.

That is good, said the horse. I am nervous as well.

Vasya shrugged and resumed gawping. The roads were paved with split logs: a welcome innovation, the footing pleasantly firm. The street wound on, past potters and forges, inns and izby, until it came to a central square.

Vasya’s stare turned to outright delight, for in this square was a market, the first she had ever seen. Merchants shouted their wares on all sides. Cloth and furs and copper ornaments, wax and pies and smoked fish…“Stay here,” Vasya said to Solovey, finding a post and looping the rope around it. “Don’t get stolen.”

A mare with a blue harness slanted an ear at the stallion and squealed. Vasya added, thoughtfully, “Try not to entice any mares, either, although perhaps you can’t help it.”

Vasya—

She narrowed her eyes. “I would have left you in the woods,” she said. “Stay here.”

The horse glared, but she was already gone, lost in delight, smelling the fine beeswax, hefting the copper bowls.

And the faces—so many faces, and not one she knew. The novelty dizzied her. Pies and porridge, cloth and leathers, beggars and prelates and artisans’ wives passed under her delighted gaze. This, she thought, is what it means to be a traveler.

Vasya was beside a fur-merchant’s stall, a reverent fingertip stroking a pelt of sable, when she realized that one of those faces was staring back at her.

A man stood across the width of the square, broad-shouldered and taller than any of her brothers. His kaftan dazzled with embroidery—what she could see of it beneath a cloak of white wolfskin. A careless sword-hilt thrust up over his shoulder, molded at the tang in the shape of a horse’s head. His beard was short and red as fire, and when he saw her looking back, he inclined his head.

Vasya frowned. What would a country boy do, beneath a lord’s thoughtful look? Not blush, surely. Even if his eyes were large and liquid and drowning-dark.

This man began crossing the crowded square, and Vasya saw that he had servants: thick, stolid men, who kept the crowd back. His eyes were fixed on her. Vasya wondered if it would be more conspicuous to stay or to flee. What could he want? She straightened her back. He crossed the whole square, accompanied by whispers, and stopped before Vasya, at the fur-merchant’s stall.

A blush crept over Vasya’s neck. Her hair was bound in a fur-lined hood, tied about her chin, and she wore her hat over that. She was as sexless as a loaf of bread, and yet…She pressed her lips together. “Forgive me, Gospodin,” she said sturdily. “I do not know you.”

He studied her a moment more. “Nor I you,” he said. His voice was lighter than she would have thought, very clear, the accent strange. “Boy. Though your face is familiar. What is your name?”

“Vasilii,” said Vasya at once. “Vasilii Petrovich, and I must be getting back to my horse.”

His eyes, curiously intent, made her uncomfortable. “Must you?” he said. “I am called Kasyan Lutovich. Will you break bread with me, Vasilii?”

Vasya was startled to find herself tempted. She was hungry, and she could not take her eyes from this tall lord, with that hint of laughter in his eyes.

She gave herself a mental shake. What would he do if he realized she was a girl? Would he be pleased? Disappointed? Either one did not bear thinking of. “I thank you,” she said, bowing as the peasants did to her father. “But I must be home before dark.”

“And where is home, Vasilii Petrovich?”

“Up the river,” said Vasya. She bowed again, trying to look servile, beginning to be nervous.

Suddenly the dark gaze released her.

“Up the river,” he repeated. “Very well, boy. Forgive me. It seems I took you for another. God be with you.”

Vasya piously made the sign of the cross, bowed, and made her escape, heart beating fast. Whether that was from his stare or his questions, she could not have said.

She found Solovey, thoroughly irritable, standing where she had left him. The mare was being dragged away by her owner, tail high, more irritable still.

A honeycake (bought from a glorious stall all wreathed in steam) restored Solovey’s good humor. Vasya mounted the horse now, eager to leave. Though the red-haired lord had gone, his thoughtful stare seemed to hang before her eyes, and the din of the city had begun to hurt her head.

She was only a little way from the city gate when she happened to turn her head to look through a gaily-painted archway. Behind the archway lay an inn-yard, in which there stood, unmistakably, a bathhouse.

All at once, Vasya’s aching head and chilled limbs reasserted themselves. She stared into the yard with longing. “Come on,” she said to Solovey. “I want a bath. I’ll find you some hay and a bowl of porridge.”

Solovey loved porridge, so he merely gave her a resigned look when she slid down his shoulder. Vasya marched boldly in, pulling the horse behind her.

Neither of them noticed the small, blue-lipped boy who detached himself from the shadow of the overhanging buildings and darted off.

A woman came from the kitchen, gap-toothed and fat with the remains of summer’s bounty. Her face had a rose’s sere beauty, when it is past its best and the petals are yellowing. “What will you have, boy?” she asked.

Vasya licked her lips and spoke up boldly, like the boy Vasilii Petrovich. “Grain and stabling for my horse,” she said. “Food and a bath for myself. If you please.”

The lady waited, arms crossed. Vasya, realizing that something must be traded for these delights, reached into a pocket and handed the inn-wife a piece of silver.

The woman’s eyes grew round as cart-wheels and her manner at once softened. Vasya realized that she had given too much, but it was too late. The inn-yard was flung into motion. Vasya led Solovey into the tiny stable (he would allow no stablehand near him). The stallion suffered himself to be tied for show to the common rail and was even sweetened by another honeycake and a flake of hay, brought tremblingly by the stable-lad.

“My horse must have a bowl of porridge, still warm,” Vasya told the boy. “And leave him alone otherwise.” She strode out of the stable with a fair show of confidence. “He bites.”

Solovey obligingly laid his ears back, whereupon the stable-lad squeaked and ran for porridge.

Vasya took off her cloak in the well-kept kitchen and sat down on the bench beside the oven, blessing the heat. Why not stay here the night—or three? she wondered. I am in no hurry.

The food came in waves: cabbage soup and hot bread, smoked fish with the head on, porridge and pasty, and eggs cooked hard. Vasya ate until even the stolid inn-wife’s eyes misted at the hunger of growing boys. She gave Vasya a great slab of milk baked with honey to eat with her mug of beer.

When at last Vasya sagged on the bench, the woman tapped her on the shoulder and told her the bath was ready.

The bathhouse was only two little rooms, dirt-floored. Vasya stripped in the outer room, pushed open the door to the inner room, and breathed greedily of the heat. In a corner of this room stood a round oven made all of stone, with a fire lit and drawing. Vasya ladled water onto the rocks and steam billowed up in a great concealing fog. She sank delightedly onto a bench and closed her eyes.

A soft scraping noise came from the vicinity of the door. Vasya’s eyes shot open.

A little naked creature stood just inside the threshold. His beard floated like steam, framing his red cheeks. When he smiled, the eyes disappeared into the folds of his face.

Vasya watched him warily. This could be no other than the bannik, the bathhouse-guardian, and banniki could be both kind and quick to anger.

“Master,” she said politely, “forgive my intrusion.” This bannik was strangely gray; his fat little body looked more like smoke than flesh.

Perhaps, Vasya thought, towns do not agree with him.

Or perhaps the constant church-bell reminded folk too often that banniki should not exist. The thought made her sad.

But this bannik still considered her in silence, with small, clever eyes, and Vasya knew what she must do next. She got up and poured out some hot water from the bucket on the stove, broke off a good birch-branch and laid it before him, then added more water to the rocks on the seething oven.

The chyert, still unspeaking, smiled at her, climbed up to the other bench, and lay back in companionable silence. His cloudy beard writhed with the steam. Vasya decided to take his silence for permission to stay. Her eyelids drooped shut again.

Perhaps a quarter-hour later, she was sweating freely, and the steam had begun to die down. She was about to go drench herself in cold water when the squeal of a furious stallion ripped through her heat-sodden senses. A resounding crash followed; it sounded as though Solovey had come bodily through the stable wall. Vasya came gasping upright.

The bannik was frowning.

A scraping noise at the outer door, and then the sound of the inn-wife’s voice, “Yes, a boy with a big bay horse, but I don’t see why you have to—”

Thick silence followed the inn-wife’s outraged shriek. The bannik bared its foggy teeth. Vasya was on her feet and reaching for the door. But before she could lift the latch, a heavy step sounded on the floor of the outer room.

Stark naked, she stared wildly around the little shed. But there was only one door, and no windows.

The door thundered open. At the last instant Vasya shook her hair forward, so that it provided meager concealment. A bar of watery daylight pierced her flinching eyes; she stood sweating in nothing but her hair.

The man at the door took a moment to pick her out of the steam. A look of surprise crossed his face, then one of oafish delight.

Vasya pressed herself against the far wall, terrified, mortified, the inn-wife’s shriek still ringing in her ears. Outside, Solovey bugled again, and there was more shouting.

Vasya struggled to think. Perhaps the man would leave her an opening to dart around him. A voice in the anteroom and a second hulking figure answered that question.

“Well,” said the second man, looking startled, but not displeased. “This is not a boy at all but a maiden—unless it’s a water-nymph. Shall we find out which?”

“I go first,” his companion retorted, not taking his eyes from Vasya. “I found her.”

“Well, then, catch her, and don’t be all day about it,” said the second man. “We have that boy to find.”

Vasya bared her teeth, hands shaking, mind blank with panic.

“Come here, girl,” said the first man, wiggling his fingers as though she were a dog. “Come here. Relax. I’ll be good to you.”

Vasya was calculating chances, wondering whether, if she flung herself on the first man, he might fall against the oven. She had to get to Solovey. Her hair fell a little away from her throat and the jewel gleamed between her breasts. The first man’s eye fell on it, and he licked his lips. “Where’d you steal that?” he said. “Well, never mind, I’ll have it, too. Come here.” He took a step forward.

She tensed to spring. But she had forgotten the bannik.

A gush of hot water came flying out of nowhere and doused the man from head to heel. He fell back screaming, tripped on the red-hot oven, struck his head with a crack, and went limp, sizzling horribly.

The second man stared, dumbfounded, even as another gout of water slapped him across the face. He stumbled backward, shrieking, and was driven from the bathhouse, flogged by an invisible hand wielding a birch stick.

Vasya dashed into the outer room. She flung on leggings, shirt, boots, and tunic and slung her cloak around her shoulders. The clothes clung to her sweating skin. The bannik waited in the doorway, silent still, but smiling now, viciously. The shouting outside had risen to a furious pitch. Vasya paused an instant and bowed low.

The creature bowed back.

Vasya ran outside. Solovey had broken out of the stable. Three men stood around him, not daring to come too near. “Get his rope!” cried a man from the arch of the gate. “Hold fast! The others are coming.”

A fourth man, who had clearly attempted to seize the rope dangling from Solovey’s neck, lay motionless on the ground with a great, seeping dent in his skull.

Solovey saw Vasya and hurled himself toward her. The men dodged, shouting, and in that moment, Vasya vaulted to the horse’s back.

Outside, more shouts rang out, the crunch of running feet. More men ran into the inn-yard, stringing their bows.

All this for her? “Mother of God—” Vasya whispered.

The wind rose to a howl, piercing her clothes, and the inn-yard plunged into shadow as clouds shut off the sun. “Go!” Vasya shouted at Solovey, just as the first of the men put an arrow to his bow.

“Halt,” he cried, “or die!”

But Solovey was already running. The arrow whistled past. Vasya clung to the horse. What, thought some dim, detached part of Vasya’s mind, did I do to merit this? The rest of her was wondering how it felt to die with a dozen arrows in her breast. Solovey had his head down now, hooves clawing at the snow. Two leaps covered the distance between her and the street. There were men there—so many men, some part of her mind thought—but Solovey took them by surprise, plowed through and past them.

The street lay in dusky twilight now. Snow fell in blinding flakes, masking them from view.

Silent and intent, Solovey ran—galloping, sliding, far too fast, across the snow of those wooden-boarded streets. Vasya felt him lurch and recover, and fought to keep her balance, blinded by the snow. Hoofbeats thudded behind them, mingled with muffled shouts, but those were already falling back. No horse could outrun Solovey.

A black shape leaped up before them: a vast, solid thing in a world of whirling white. “The gate!” came the faint cry. “Close the gate!” The dim shapes of guards, two on either side, were urging the massive thing closed. The gap was narrowing. But Solovey put on a burst of speed and dashed through. A wrench as Vasya’s leg scraped wood. Then they were free. A burst of shouting broke from the wall-top, and the twang and hiss of another arrow. She hunched nearer Solovey’s neck and did not look back. The snow was falling thicker than ever.

No more than a bowshot from the city, the wind abruptly died and the sky cleared. Looking back, Vasya saw that a snowstorm, purple as a bruise, lay over the town, shielding her escape. But for how long?

The bells were ringing below. Would they come after her? She thought of the drawn bow, the whine as the arrow slid past her ear. It seemed to her that they would. Her heart was racing still. “L-let’s go,” she said to Solovey. It was only when she tried to speak that she realized that she was shaking, that her teeth clacked together, that her skin was wet, that already she was growing very cold. She turned him toward the hollow tree where she had hidden his saddle and saddlebags. “We must get away from here.”

A violet evening sky hung glowing overhead. Vasya’s skin was still wet from the bathhouse, and her hair, hidden in her hood, was damp. But she weighed the dangers of fire against the dangers of flight and pushed the horse on. Somewhere in her brain was an arrow, narrowing to a point, and a man with composed, inhuman eyes, taking aim.

8. Two Gifts

Solovey galloped the rest of the evening and into the night, long after any ordinary horse would have staggered to a halt. Vasya made no attempt to check him: fear was a steady drumbeat in her throat. The last of the violet faded from the sky, and then the only light came from the stars on pristine snow. Still the horse galloped, sure as a night-flying bird.

They only stopped when a cold wolf moon rose above the black treetops. Vasya was shivering so violently that she could barely hold herself in the saddle. Solovey stumbled to a halt, winded. Vasya slid from the horse’s back, unfastened the saddle, untied her cloak, and threw it over Solovey’s steaming flanks. The cold night air pierced her sheepskin coat and found the damp shirt beneath.

“Walk,” Vasya told the horse. “Don’t you dare stop. Don’t bite at the snow. Wait until I have warmed water.”

Solovey’s head hung down; she slapped his flank with a hand she could barely feel. “Walk, I said!” she snapped, fierce with her own fearful exhaustion.

With an effort, the horse jerked into the motion that would keep his muscles from knotting.

Vasya was shivering convulsively; her limbs would barely obey her. The moon had hovered a little, like a beggar at the door, but it was already setting. There was no sound but the creaking of trees in the frost. Her hands were stiff; she could not feel her fingertips. She gathered wood with gritted teeth and then pulled out her flints, fumbling. One strike, two, agony on her hands. She dropped one in the snow, and her hand would barely close when she tried to pick it up again.

The tinder flared and went out.

She had gnawed her lip bloody, but she couldn’t feel it. Tears had frozen on her face, but she couldn’t feel them either. Once more. Tap the flints. Wait. Blow, gently, on the flame through numb lips. This time the tinder caught and a little warmth drifted into the night.

Vasya almost sobbed with relief. She fed the fire carefully, adding sticks with near-useless hands. The fire steadied, strengthened. In a few moments she had a hot blaze and snow melting in a pot. She drank, and Solovey drank. The horse’s eyes brightened.

But though Vasya fed the fire, and dried her clothes as best she could; though she drank pot after pot of hot water, she could not really get warm. Sleep was a slow and fitful thing; her anxious ears turned every noise into the soft feet of pursuers. But she must have slept at last, for she awoke at daybreak, still cold. Solovey was standing stock-still above her, scenting the morning.

Horses, he said. Many horses, coming toward us, ridden by heavy men.

Vasya ached in all her joints. She coughed once, a tearing hack, and came painfully to her feet. A nasty sweat slimed her cold skin. “It cannot be them,” she said, trying for courage. “What—what possible reason—”

She trailed off. There were voices among the trees. Her fear was a wild thing’s fear when the dogs are running. She was already wearing every garment she possessed. In a moment, she had bundled the saddlebags onto Solovey’s back, and they were off again.

Another long day, another long ride. Vasya drank a little snowmelt as they went, and gnawed listlessly at half-frozen bread. But swallowing hurt, and her stomach was knotted with fear. Solovey drove himself even harder that day, if it were possible. Vasya rode in a daze. Snow—if only it would snow and cover their tracks.

They stopped at full dark. That night Vasya did not sleep, but crouched beside her tiny fire and shivered and shivered and could not stop. Her cough had settled into her lungs. In her head Morozko’s words fell like footsteps. Do you want to die in some forest hollow?

She would not prove him right. She would not. With that thought ringing in her head, she drifted at last into another uneasy sleep.

During the night, the clouds rolled in, and the longed-for snow fell at last, melting on her hot skin. She was safe. They could not track her now.

AT SUNRISE, VASYA AWOKE with a boiling fever.

Solovey nudged her, huffing. When she tried to rise and saddle him, the earth tilted beneath her. “I cannot,” she told the horse. Her head felt heavy, and she looked at her shaking hands as though they belonged to someone else. “I cannot.”

Solovey nudged her hard in the chest, so that she staggered backward. With ears pinned, the horse said, You must move, Vasya. We cannot stay here.

Vasya stared, her brain thick and slow. In winter, stillness was death. She knew it. She knew it. Why couldn’t she care? She didn’t care. She wanted to lie down again and go to sleep. But she had been foolish enough already; she didn’t want to displease Solovey.

She could not manage the girth with her numb hands, but with an effort she heaved the saddlebags up over the horse’s withers. Slurring, she said, “I am going to walk. I’m too cold; I will—I will fall if I try to ride.”

The clouds rolled in that day, and the sky darkened. Vasya plodded on doggedly, more than half-dreaming. Once she thought she saw her stepmother, watching dead in the undergrowth, and fright jerked her back to herself. Another step. Another. Then her body grew strangely hot, so that she was tempted to take off her clothes, before she remembered that it would kill her.

She fancied that she could hear horses’ hooves, and the calling of men in the distance. Were they still following? She could hardly bring herself to care. Step. Another. Surely she could lie down…just for a moment…

Then she realized with terror that someone walked beside her. Next moment a familiar, cutting voice spoke in her ear. “Well, you lasted a fortnight longer than I thought you would. I congratulate you.”

She turned her head to meet eyes of palest winter-blue. Her head cleared a little, though her lips and tongue were numb. “You were right,” she said bitterly. “I am dying. Have you come for me?”

Morozko made a derisive noise and picked her up. His hands burned hot—not cold—even through her furs.

“No,” Vasya said, pushing. “No. Go away. I am not going to die.”

“Not for lack of trying,” he retorted, but she thought his face had lightened.

Vasya wanted to reply but couldn’t; the world was swooping around her. Pale sky overhead—no—green boughs. They had ducked into the shelter of a large spruce—much like the tree of her first night. The spruce’s feathered branches twined so close that only the faintest dusting of snow had crept down to tint the iron-hard earth.

Morozko put her down, leaning on the trunk, and set to making a fire. Vasya watched him with dazed eyes, still not cold.

He did not go about building a fire the usual way. Instead he went to one of the spruce’s greater limbs and laid a hand upon it. The branch cracked and fell away. He pulled the pieces apart with hard fingers until he had a bristling heap.

“You can’t light a fire under the trees,” said Vasya wisely, slurring her words around numb lips. “The snow above you will melt and put it out.”

He shot her a sardonic look, but said nothing.

She did not see what he did, whether it was with his hands or his eyes or none of these. But suddenly there was a fire where before there had not been, snapping and glimmering on the bare earth.

Vasya was vaguely disquieted, seeing the heat-shimmer rise. The warmth, she knew, would draw her from her cocoon of cold-induced indifference. Part of her wanted to stay where she was. Not fighting. Not caring. Not feeling the cold. A slow darkness gathered over her sight, and she thought she just might go to sleep…

But he stalked over to her, bent, and took her by the shoulders. His hands were gentler than his voice. “Vasya,” he said. “Look at me.”

She looked, but darkness was pulling her away.

His face hardened. “No,” he breathed into her ear. “Don’t you dare.”

“I thought I was supposed to travel alone,” she murmured. “I thought— Why are you here?”

He picked her up again; her head lolled against his arm. He did not reply but carried her nearer the fire. His own mare poked her head into the shelter beneath the spruce-boughs, with Solovey beside her, blowing anxiously. “Go away,” he told them.

He stripped off Vasya’s cloak and knelt with her beside the flames.

She licked cracked lips, tasting blood. “Am I going to die?”

“Do you think you are?” A cold hand at her neck; her breath whined in her throat, but he only lifted the silver chain and drew out the sapphire pendant.

“Of course not,” she replied with a flash of irritation. “I’m just so cold—”

“Very well, then you won’t,” he said, as though it was obvious, but again she thought that something lightened in his expression.

“How—” but then she swallowed and fell silent, for the sapphire had begun to glow. Blue light gleamed eerily over his face, and the light stirred fearful memory: the jewel burning cold while a laughing shadow crept nearer. Vasya shrank from him.

His arms tightened. “Gently, Vasya.”

His voice halted her. She had never heard that note in it before, of uncalculated tenderness.

“Gently,” he said again. “I will not hurt you.”

He said it like a promise. She looked up at him, wide-eyed, shivering, and then she forgot fear, for with the sapphire’s glow came warmth—agonizing warmth, living warmth—and in that moment she realized just how cold she had been. The stone burned hotter and hotter, until she bit her lips to keep from crying out. Then the breath rushed out of her, and a stinking sweat ran down her ribs. Her fever had broken.

Morozko laid the necklace down on her filthy shirt and settled with her onto the snow-tinted earth. The coolness of the winter night hung around his body, but his skin was warm. He wrapped them both in his blue cloak. Vasya sneezed when the fur tickled her nose.

Warmth poured from the necklace and began coiling through all her limbs. The sweat ran down her face. In silence, he took up her left hand and then her right, tracing the fingers one by one. Agony flared once more, up her arms this time, but it was a grateful agony, breaking through the numbness. Her hands prickled painfully back to life.

“Be still,” he said, catching both her hands in one of his. “Softly. Softly.” His other hand drew lines of fiery pain on her nose and ears and cheeks and lips. She shuddered but held still for it. He had healed the incipient frostbite.

At last Morozko’s hand stilled; he wrapped an arm around her waist. A cool wind came and eased the burning.

“Go to sleep, Vasya,” he murmured. “Go to sleep. Enough for one day.”

“There were men,” she said. “They wanted—”

“No one can find you here,” he returned. “Do you doubt me?”

She sighed. “No.” She was on the edge of sleep, warm and—safe. “Did you send the snowstorm?”

A ghost of a smile flitted across his face, though she did not see. “Perhaps. Go to sleep.”

Her eyelids fluttered shut, and she did not hear what he added, almost to himself. “And forget,” he murmured. “Forget. It is better so.”

VASYA AWOKE TO BRIGHT MORNING—the cold smell of fir, the hot smell of fire, and sun-dappled shadows beneath the spruce. She was wrapped in her cloak and in her bedroll. A well-tended blaze chattered and danced beside her. Vasya lay still for long moments, savoring an unaccustomed feeling of security. She was warm—for what seemed like the first time in weeks—and the pain had gone from her throat and joints.

Then she remembered the night before and sat up.

Morozko sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. He held a knife and was carving a bird out of wood.

She sat up, stiffly, light and weak and empty. How long had she been asleep? The fire was good on her face. “Why carve things of wood,” she asked him, “if you can make marvelous things of ice with only your hands?”

He glanced up. “God be with you, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said, with considerable irony. “Is that not what one says in the morning? I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.”

She paused, considering this. “Did you save my life?” she asked at length. “Again?”

The most fleeting of pauses. “I did.” He did not look up from his whittling.

“Why?”

He tilted the bird-carving this way and that. “Why not?”

Vasya had only a vague memory of gentleness, of light, of fire and of pain. Her eyes met his over the shimmer of the flame. “Did you know?” she demanded. “You knew. The snowstorm. That was certainly you. Did you know the whole time? That I was being hunted, that I was sick on the road, and you only came on the third day, when I could not even drag myself to my feet…”

He waited until she trailed off. “You wanted your freedom,” he replied, insufferably. “You wanted to see the world. Now you know what it is like. Now you know what it is like to be dying. You needed to know.”

She said nothing, resentfully.

“But,” he finished, “now you know, and you are not dead. Better you return to Lesnaya Zemlya. This road is no place for you.”

“No,” she said. “I am not going back.”

He laid wood and knife aside and stood, his glance suddenly brilliant with anger. “Do you think I want to spend my days keeping you from folly?”

“I didn’t ask for your help!”

“No,” he retorted. “You were too busy dying!”

The passive peace of her waking had quite gone. Vasya was sore in every limb and vividly alive. Morozko watched her with glowing eyes, angry and intent, and in that moment he seemed as alive as she.

Vasya clambered to her feet. “How was I supposed to know that those men would find me in that town? That they would hunt me? It wasn’t my fault. I am going on.” She crossed her arms.

Morozko’s hair was tousled, and soot and wood-dust stained his fingers. He looked exasperated. “Men are both vicious and unaccountable,” he said. “I have had cause to learn it, and now so have you. You have had your fun. And nearly gotten your death out of it. Go home, Vasya.”

Since they were both standing, she could see his face without the heat-shimmer between them. Again there was that subtle—difference—in his looks. He had changed, somehow, and she couldn’t…“You know,” she said, almost to herself, “you look nearly human when you are angry. I never noticed.”

She did not expect his reaction. He drew himself up; his face chilled, and suddenly he was the remote winter-king again. He bowed, gracefully. “I will return at nightfall,” he said. “The fire will last the day, if you stay here.”

She had the puzzling feeling that she had routed him, and she wondered what she had said. “I—”

But he was already gone, on the mare’s back and away. Vasya was left blinking beside the fire, angry and a little bewildered. “A bell, perhaps,” she remarked to Solovey. “Like a sledge-horse, that we may better mark his coming.”

The horse snorted and said, I am glad you are not dead, Vasya.

She thought again of the frost-demon. “As am I.”

Do you think you could make porridge? added the horse, hopefully.

NOT FAR AWAY—OR PERHAPS very far away—depending on who did the measuring, the white mare refused to gallop any more. I do not wish to run about the world to relieve your feelings, she informed him. Get off or I will have you off.

Morozko dismounted, in no very sweet temper, while the white mare lowered her nose and began scraping for grass beneath the snow.

Unable to ride, he paced the winter earth, while clouds boiled up in the north and blew snow-flurries on them both. “She was supposed to go home,” he snarled to no one in particular. “She was supposed to tire of her folly, go home with her necklace, wear it, and tremble sometimes, at the memory of a frost-demon, in her impetuous youth. She was supposed to bear girl-children who might wear the necklace in turn. She was not supposed to—”

Enchant you, finished the horse with some asperity, not raising her nose from the snow. Her tail lashed her flanks. Do not pretend otherwise. Or has she dragged you near enough to humanity that you have also become a hypocrite?

Morozko halted and faced the horse, narrow-eyed.

I am not blind, continued the mare. Even to things that go on two feet. You made that jewel so that you would not fade. But now it is doing too much. It is making you alive. It is making you want what you cannot have, and feel what you ought not to understand, and you are beguiled and afraid. Better to leave her to her fate, but you cannot.

Morozko pressed his lips together. The trees sighed overhead. All at once his anger seemed to leave him. “I do not want to fade,” he said unwillingly. “But I do not want to be alive. How can a death-god be alive?” He paused, and something changed in his voice. “I could have let her die, and taken the sapphire from her and tried again, found another to remember. There are others of that bloodline.”

The mare’s ears went forward and back.

“I did not,” he said abruptly. “I cannot. Yet every time I go near her, the bond tightens. What immortal ever knew what it was like to number his days? Yet I can feel the hours passing when she is near.”

The mare nosed again at the deep snow. Morozko resumed his pacing.

Let her go, then, said the mare, quietly, from behind him. Let her find her own fate. You cannot love and be immortal. Do not let it come to that. You are not a man.

VASYA DID NOT LEAVE the space under the spruce-tree that day, although she meant to. “I am never going home,” she said to Solovey, around a lump in her throat. “I am well. Why tarry here?”

Because it was warm under the spruce—actually warm—with the fire snapping merrily, and all her limbs still felt slow and feeble. So Vasya stayed, and made porridge, then soup from the dried meat and salt in her saddlebag. She wished she had the energy to snare rabbits.

The fire burned on steadily, whether or not she added wood. She wondered how the snow above it did not melt, how she was not smoked out of her place beneath the spruce.

Magic, she thought restlessly. Perhaps I can learn magic. Then I would never go in fear of traps, or pursuit.

When the snow was blue-hollowed with the failing day, and the fire had grown a touch brighter than the world outside, Vasya looked up to find Morozko standing just inside the ring of light.

Vasya said, “I am not going home.”

“That,” he returned, “is obvious, despite my best efforts. Do you mean to set off straightaway and ride through the night?”

A chill wind shook the spruce-branches. “No,” she said.

He nodded once, curtly, and said, “Then I will build up the fire.”

This time she watched him carefully when he put a hand against the skin of the spruce, and bark and limb crumbled dry and dead into his waiting palm. But she still did not know exactly what he did. First there was living wood, then, between one blink and the next, it became kindling. Her eyes kept wanting to skitter away, at the strangeness of his almost-human hand, doing a thing a man could not.

When the fire was roaring, Morozko tossed Vasya a rabbit-skin bag, then went to tend the white mare. Vasya caught the bag by reflex, staggering; it was heavier than it looked. She undid the ties and discovered apples, chestnuts, cheese, and a loaf of dark bread. She almost yelled in childlike delight.

When Morozko slid back through the curtain of spruce, he found her smashing nuts with the flat of her belt-knife and scrabbling hungrily for the nut-meats with dirty fingers.

“Here,” he said, a wry note in his voice.

Her head jerked up. The carcass of a big rabbit, gutted and cleaned, hung incongruously from his elegant fingers.

“Thank you!” Vasya gasped with bare politeness. She seized the thing at once, spitted it, and set it over the fire. Solovey put his head curiously under the spruce, eyed the roasting flesh, shot her an offended look, and disappeared again. Vasya ignored him, busy toasting her bread, while she waited for the meat. The bread browned and she gobbled it steaming, with cheese running down the sides. Earlier she had not been hungry, dying as she was, but now her body reminded her that her hot meal in Chudovo was long ago, and the hard, cold days had reduced her flesh to bone and skin and strings. She was ravenous.

When at last Vasya came up for air, licking bread-crumbs from her fingers, the rabbit was almost done and Morozko was looking at her with a bemused expression. “The cold makes me hungry,” she explained unnecessarily, feeling more cheerful than she had in days.

“I know,” he returned.

“How did you take the rabbit?” she asked, turning the meat with deft, greasy hands. Nearly ready. “There was no mark on it.”

Twin flames danced in his crystalline eyes. “I froze its heart.”

Vasya shuddered and asked no more.

He did not speak while she ate the meat. At last she sat back and said “Thank you,” once more, although she couldn’t help adding with some resentment, “Although if you meant to save my life you could have done it before I was dying.”

“Do you still wish to be a traveler, Vasilisa Petrovna?” he returned, only.

Vasya thought of the archer, the whine of his arrow, the grime on her skin, the killing cold, the terror of being ill and alone in the wilderness. She thought of sunsets and golden towers and of a world no longer bounded by village and forest.

“Yes,” she said.

“Very well,” said Morozko, his face growing grim. “Come, are you fed?”

“Yes.”

“Then stand up. I am going to teach you to fight with a knife.”

She stared.

“Did the fever take your hearing?” he demanded, waspish. “On your feet, girl. You say you mean to be a traveler; very well, better you not go defenseless. A knife cannot turn arrows, but it is a useful thing sometimes. I do not mean to be always running about the world saving you from folly.”

She rose slowly, uncertain. He reached overhead, where a fringe of icicles drooped, and broke one off. The ice softened, shaped to his hand.

Vasya watched, hungry-eyed, wishing she could also perform wonders.

Under his fingers, the icicle became a long dagger, hard and perfect and finished. Its blade was of ice, its hilt of crystal: a cold, pale weapon.

Morozko handed it to her.

“But—I do not—” she stammered, staring down at the shining thing. Girls did not touch weapons, beyond the skinning-knife in the kitchen or a little axe for chopping wood. And a knife made of ice…

“You do now,” he said. “Traveler.” The great blue forest lay silent as a chapel beneath a risen moon, and the black trees soared impossibly, merging with the cloudy sky.

Vasya thought of her brothers, having their first lessons in bow or sword, and felt strange in her own skin.

“You hold it thus,” Morozko said. His fingers framed hers, setting her grip aright. His hand was bitingly cold. She flinched.

He let her go and stepped back, expression unchanged. Frost-crystals had caught in his dark hair and a knife like hers lay loose in his hand.

Vasya swallowed, her mouth dry. The dagger dragged her hand earthward. Nothing made of ice had a right to be so heavy.

“Thus,” Morozko said.

The next moment, she was spitting out snow, hand stinging, her knife nowhere to be seen.

“Hold it like that and any child could take it from you,” the frost-demon said. “Try again.”

She looked for the shards of her knife, sure it had fallen to pieces. But it lay whole, innocent and deadly, reflecting the firelight.

Vasya grasped it carefully, as he had shown her, and tried again.

She tried many times, all through that long night, and through another day, and another night that followed. He showed her how to turn another blade with hers, how to stab someone unsuspecting, in several ways.

She was not without speed, she soon discovered, and was light on her feet, but she had not the strength of a warrior, built up from childhood. She tired quickly. Morozko was merciless; he did not seem to move so much as drift, and his blade went everywhere, silken, effortless.

“Where did you learn it?” she gasped once, nursing her aching fingers after yet another fall. “Or did you come into the world knowing?”

Without replying, he offered her a hand. Vasya ignored it and clambered to her feet. “Learn?” he said then. Was that bitterness in his voice? “How? I am as I was made: unchanging. Long ago, men dreamed a sword into my hand. Gods diminish, but they do not change. Now try again.”

Vasya, wondering, hefted her knife and said nothing more.

That first night they stopped only when Vasya’s arm shook and the blade fell from her nerveless fingers. She leaned on her thighs, panting and bruised. The forest creaked in the darkness outside their ring of firelight.

Morozko shot the fire a glance and it leaped up, roaring. Vasya gratefully sank down onto her heap of boughs and warmed her hands.

“Will you teach me to do magic, too?” she asked him. “To make fire with my eyes?”

The fire flared sudden and harsh on the bones of Morozko’s face. “There is no such thing as magic.”

“But you just—”

“Things are or they are not, Vasya,” he interrupted. “If you want something, it means you do not have it, it means that you do not believe it is there, which means it will never be there. The fire is or it is not. That which you call magic is simply not allowing the world to be other than as you will it.”

Her weary brain refused to comprehend. She scowled.

“Having the world as you wish—that is not for the young,” he added. “They want too much.”

“How do you know what I want?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Because,” he replied between his teeth, “I am considerably older than you.”

“You are immortal,” she ventured. “Do you not want anything?”

He fell suddenly silent. Then he said, “Are you warm? We will try again.”

LATE ON THE FORTH NIGHT, when Vasya sat bruised beside the fire, aching too much even to find her bedroll and solace in sleep, she said, “I have a question.”

He had her knife over his knee, running his hands over the blade. If she caught him out of the corner of her eye, she could see frost-crystals, following the line of his fingers, smoothing the blade.

“Speak,” he replied, not looking up. “What is it?”

“You took my father away, didn’t you? I saw you ride off with him after the Bear—”

Morozko’s hands stilled. His expression invited her, firmly, to be quiet and go to sleep. But she could not. She had thought of this much, through the long nights of her riding, when the cold kept her awake.

“And you do it every time?” she pressed. “For everyone who dies in Rus’? Take them, dead, onto your saddlebow and ride away?”

“Yes—and no.” He seemed to measure out the words. “In a way I am present, but—it’s like breathing. You breathe, but you are not aware of every breath.”

“Were you aware of that breath,” asked Vasya acidly, “when my father died?”

A line like spider-silk showed between his brows. “More than usual,” he replied. “But that was because I—my thinking self—was nearby, and because—”

He fell abruptly silent.

“What?” the girl asked.

“Nothing. I was nearby, that’s all.”

Vasya’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have to take him away. I could have saved him.”

“He died to see you safe,” said Morozko. “It was what he wanted. And he was glad to go. He missed your mother. Even your brother knew that.”

“It doesn’t matter to you at all, does it?” Vasya snapped. This was the core of it: not her father’s death, but the frost-demon’s vast indifference. “I suppose you hovered over my mother’s bed, ready to snatch her from us, and then you stole my father and rode off with him. One day it will be Alyosha slung over your saddlebow, and one day me. And it all means less to you than breathing!”

“Are you angry with me, Vasilisa Petrovna?” His voice held only mild surprise, quiet and inevitable: snow falling in a country without spring. “Do you think that there would be no death if I weren’t there to lead people into the dark? I am old, but old as I am, the world was far older before I ever saw my first moonrise.”

Vasya found then, to her horror, that her eyes were spilling over. She turned away and suddenly she was weeping into her hands, mourning her parents, her nurse, her home, her childhood. He had taken it all from her. Or had he? Was he the cause or merely the messenger? She hated him. She dreamed about him. None of it mattered. Might as well hate the sky—or desire it—and she hated that worst of all.

Solovey poked his head beneath the fir-branches. You are well, Vasya? he demanded, with a crooked anxious nose.

She tried to nod, but only made a helpless motion with her head, face buried in her hands.

Solovey shook his mane. You did this, he said to Morozko, ears pinned. Fix her!

She heard his sigh, heard his footsteps when he came around the fire and knelt in front of her. Vasya wouldn’t look at him. After a moment, he reached out and gently peeled her fingers from her wet face.

Vasya tried to glare, blinking away tears. What could he say? Hers was a grief he would not understand, being a thing immortal. But—“I’m sorry,” he said, surprising her.

She nodded, swallowed, and said, “I’m just so tired—”

He nodded. “I know. But you are brave, Vasya.” He hesitated, then bent forward and gently kissed her on the mouth.

She had a fleeting taste of winter: smoke and pine and deadly cold, and then there was warmth, too, and a swift, impossible sweetness.

But the instant was over, and he drew away. For a moment, each breathed the other’s breath. “Be at peace, Vasilisa Petrovna,” he said. He got up and left the ring of firelight.

Vasya did not go after him. She was bewildered, aching, bruised all over, aflame and afraid at once. She meant to go after him, of course. She meant to go and demand what he meant by—but she fell asleep, with the knife of ice in her hand—and the last thing she remembered was the taste of pine on her lips.

WHAT NOW? THE MARE asked Morozko when he returned late that night. They stood together near the fire under the spruce. Living embers cast a wavering light on Vasya’s face as she slept, curled against a dozing Solovey. The stallion had shoved his way beneath the spruce and lain down beside her like a hound.

“I do not know,” Morozko murmured.

The mare nudged her rider hard, for all the world like her colt. You ought to tell her, she said. Tell her the whole story: of witches and a sapphire talisman and horses by the sea. She is wise enough, and she has the right to know. Otherwise you are only playing with her; you are the winter-king of long ago, that turned girls’ hearts for his own ends.

“Am I not still the winter-king?” Morozko asked. “That is what I meant to do: beguile her with gold and with wonders and then send her home. That is what I should still do.”

If only you could send her away, said the mare drily. And become a fond memory. But instead you are here, interfering. If you try to send Vasya home, she will not go. You are not master in this.

“No matter,” he said sharply. “This—it is the last time.” He did not look at Vasya again. “She has made the road her home; that is her business now, not mine. She is alive; I will leave her to wear the jewel and remember, so long as her life lasts. When she dies, I will give it to another. It is enough.”

The mare made no answer, but she blew out a steaming breath, skeptically, into the darkness.

9. Smoke

When Vasya awoke the next morning, Morozko and the mare were gone. He might never have been there; she might have thought it all a dream, but for two sets of hoofprints, and the glittering knife beside her restored saddle, her saddlebags newly bulging. The knife-blade did not look like ice now, but like some pale metal, sheathed in leather, bound in silver. Vasya sat up and glared at it all.

He says to practice with the knife, said Solovey, coming up to nose her hair. And that it will not stick in its sheath in the frost. And that those who carry weapons often die sooner, so please do not carry it openly.

Vasya thought of Morozko’s hands, correcting her grip on the dagger. She thought of his mouth. Her skin colored and suddenly she was furious, that he would kiss her, give her gifts, and leave her without a word.

Solovey had no sympathy for her anger; he was snorting and tossing his head, eager for the road. Scowling, Vasya found new bread and mead in her saddlebag and ate, threw snow on the fire (which went out quite meekly after lasting so long), fastened the saddlebags, and climbed into the saddle.

The versts passed untroubled, and Vasya had days of riding in which to regain her strength, to remember—and to try to forget. But one morning, when the sun was well over the treetops, Solovey threw up his head and shied.

Vasya, startled, said, “What!”—and then she saw the body.

He had been a big man, but now his beard bristled with frost, and his open eyes stared out, frozen and blank. He lay in a bloody stretch of trampled snow.

Vasya, reluctantly, slid to the ground. Swallowing back nausea, she saw what the man had died of: the stroke of a sword or an ax, in the notch where his neck met his shoulder, that had split him to the ribs. Her gorge rose; she forced it down.

Vasya touched his stiff hand. A single pair of bootprints had taken this man, running, to his end.

But where were the killers? Vasya bent to retrace the dead man’s steps. A dusting of new snow had left them blurry. Solovey followed her, blowing nervously.

Abruptly the trees ended, and they found themselves at the edge of cleared fields. In the middle of the fields lay a village, burned.

Vasya felt sick again. The burnt village was very like her own: izby and barns and bathhouses, a wooden palisade and stumpy wintertime fields. But these huts were smoldering ruins. The palisade lay on its side like a wounded deer. The smoke rolled out over the forest. Vasya bent her head to breathe through a fold of her cloak. She could hear the wailing.

They are gone, the ones who did this, said Solovey.

Not long gone, though, Vasya thought. Here and there little fires still dotted the landscape, that time or labor had not put out. Vasya vaulted to Solovey’s back. “Go closer,” she told the horse, and she hardly recognized her own voice.

They slipped out from between the trees beside the remains of the palisade. Solovey leaped it, nostrils showing red. The survivors in the village moved stiffly, as if ready to join the dead they were piling before the ruin of a little church. It was too cold for the bodies to smell. The blood had clotted on their wounds, and they stared open-mouthed at the brilliant sky.

The living did not raise their eyes.

In the shadow of one izba, a woman with two dark plaits knelt beside a dead man. Her hands curled into each other like dead leaves, and her body slumped, though she was not weeping.

Something about the line of the woman’s hair, black as gall against a slender back, caught at Vasya’s memory. She was off Solovey before she thought.

The woman stumbled upright, and of course she was not Vasya’s sister; she was no one Vasya knew. Only a peasant with too many cold days stamped on her face. The blood had been ground into her palms, where she must have tried to stanch a death-wound. A dirty knife appeared in her hand and she pressed her back to the wall of her house. Her voice came grating from her throat. “Your fellows came and went already,” she said to Vasya. “We have nothing else. One of us will die, boy, before you can touch me.”

“I—no,” said Vasya, stammering in her pity. “I am not one of the ones who did this; I am only a traveler.”

The woman did not lower her knife. “Who are you?”

“I—I am called Vasya,” said the girl cautiously, for Vasya could be a nickname for a boy, Vasilii, as well as a girl, Vasilisa. “Can you tell me what has happened here?”

The woman’s furious laughter shrilled in Vasya’s ears. “Where do you come from, that you do not know? The Tatars came.”

“You, there,” said a hard voice. “Who are you?”

Vasya’s head jerked around. An old muzhik was striding toward her, hard and broad and death-pale under his beard. His split knuckles bled around the bloody scythe clutched in his hand. Others appeared, stepping around the burning places. They all held rude weapons, axes and hunting-knives; most had blood on their faces. “Who are you?” The cry came from half a dozen throats, and then the villagers were closing round her. “Horseman,” said one. “A straggler. A boy. Kill him.”

Without thinking, Vasya threw herself onto Solovey. The stallion took a great galloping stride and leaped over the heads of the nearest villagers, who fell swearing into the bloody snow. The horse came down light as a leaf and would have kept running then, out of the wreckage and back into the forest, but Vasya ground her seat-bones into his back and forced him to a halt. Solovey stood still, barely, poised on the edge of flight.

Vasya found herself facing a ring of frightened, furious faces. “I mean you no harm,” she said, heart hammering. “I am no raider, only a traveler, alone.”

“Where did you come from?” called one villager.

“From the forest,” said Vasya, with half-truth. “What has happened here?”

An ugly pause, full of violent grief. Then the woman with black hair spoke. “Bandits. They brought fire and arrows and steel. They came for our girls.”

“Your girls? Did they take them?” demanded Vasya. “Where?”

“They took three,” said the man bitterly. “Three little ones. It has been so since the winter started, in every village in these parts. They come, they burn what they will, and then they take their pick of the children.” He gestured vaguely at the forest. “Girls—always girls. Rada there”—he gestured toward the black-haired woman—“had her daughter stolen, and her husband slain when he fought. She has no one now.”

“They took my Katya.” Rada’s bloody hands twisted together. “I told my husband not to fight, that I could not lose them both. But when they dragged our girl away, he couldn’t bear it…” Her voice strangled and fell silent.

Words filled Vasya’s mouth, but there was not one that would serve. “I am sorry,” she said at length. “I am—” She was trembling all over. Suddenly Vasya touched Solovey’s side; the horse wheeled and galloped away. Behind her she heard cries, but she did not look back. Solovey vaulted the damaged palisade and slipped in among the trees.

The horse knew her thought before she voiced it. We aren’t going on, are we?

“No.”

I wish you’d learn how to fight properly before you start getting into them, the horse said unhappily. A white ring showed around his eye. But he made no protest when she nudged him back to where the dead man lay in the wood.

“I’m going to try to help,” said Vasya. “Bogatyry ride the world, rescuing maidens. Why not I?” She spoke with more bravado than she felt. Her ice-dagger seemed a mighty responsibility, in its sheath along her spine. She thought also of her father, her mother, her nurse: the people she had not been able to save.

The horse did not reply. The wood was perfectly still, beneath a careless sun. The horse’s breathing and hers seemed loud in the silence. “No, I don’t mean to get into a fight,” she said. “I’d be killed, and then Morozko will have been right, and I can’t allow that. Sneaking, Solovey, we will sneak, as little girls who steal honeycakes do.” She tried for a tone of careless courage, but her gut was cold and shaking.

She slid to the ground beside the dead man and began to search in earnest for tracks. But she found nothing to show where the raiders had gone.

“Bandits are not ghosts,” Vasya said to Solovey in frustration. “What manner of men do not leave tracks?”

The horse switched his tail, uneasy, but made no answer.

Vasya was thinking hard. “Come on, then,” she said. “We have to go back to the village.”

The sun had passed its zenith. The trees nearest the palisade threw long shadows onto the ruined izby and hid a little of the horror. Solovey halted at the edge of the wood. “Wait for me here,” said Vasya.“If I call, you must come for me at once. Knock people down if you have to. I am not going to die because of their fear.”

The horse dropped his nose into her palm.

The village lay in ghostly silence. Its people had all gone to the church, where a pyre was building. Vasya, clinging to the shadows, crept past the palisade and flattened herself against the wall of Rada’s house. The woman was nowhere in sight, though there were drag marks where they had taken her husband away.

Vasya firmed her lips and slipped inside the hut. A pig in one corner squealed; her heart almost stopped. “Hush,” she told it.

The creature eyed her beadily.

Vasya went to the oven. Foolish chance, this, but she could think of nothing else. She had a little cold bread in her hand. “I see you,” she said softly, into the cold oven-mouth. “I am not of your people, but I have brought you bread.”

There was a silence. The oven-mouth was still, a deadly hush lay upon that house, whose master was dead, whose child had been stolen.

Vasya ground her teeth. Why would a strange house’s domovoi come at her calling? Perhaps she was a fool.

Then movement came from deep in the oven, and a small, sooty creature, all covered in hair, poked its head out of the oven-mouth. Twiggy fingers splayed on the hearthstones, it shrilled, “Go away! This is my house.”

Vasya was glad to see this domovoi, and gladder still to see him a solid creature, unlike the cloudy bannik in that ill-fated bathhouse. She laid her bread carefully on the bricks before the oven. “A broken house now,” she said.

Sooty tears welled in the domovoi’s eyes, and it sat down in the oven-mouth with a puff of ash. “I tried to tell them,” it said. “ ‘Death,’ I cried, last night. ‘Death.’ But they only heard the wind.”

“I am going after Rada’s child,” said Vasya. “I mean to bring her back. But I do not know how to find her. There are no tracks in the snow.” She spoke with her head turned, listening hard for footsteps outside. “Master,” she said to the domovoi. “My nurse told me that if a family ever leaves its house, a domovoi may follow, if his people ask him rightly. The child cannot ask, but I am asking on her behalf. Do you know where this child has gone? Can you help me follow her?”

The domovoi said nothing, sucking its splintery fingers.

It was only a faint hope after all, Vasya thought.

“Take a coal,” said the domovoi, voice gone soft, like settling embers. “Take it, and follow the light. If you bring my Katya back, my kind will owe you a debt.”

Vasya drew a pleased breath, surprised at her success. “I will do my best.” She reached into the oven with her mittened hand and seized a lump of cold, charred wood. “There is no light,” she said, examining it doubtfully.

The domovoi said nothing; when she looked, it had disappeared back into the oven. The pig squealed again; faintly Vasya heard voices from the other end of the village, the crunch of feet in the snow. She ran to the door, stumbling on warped floorboards. Outside it was true evening now, full of concealing shadows.

On the other side of the village, the pyre caught and went up: a beacon in the fading light. The wailing rose with the smoke, as the people mourned their dead.

“God keep you all,” Vasya whispered, and then she was out the door and away, back into the clean forest, where Solovey waited beneath the trees.

The domovoi’s coal was still gray as the evening. Vasya mounted Solovey and peered down at it, dubiously. “We’ll try different directions and see what happens,” she said at length.

It was getting dark. The horse’s ears eased back in obvious disapproval of such slipshod proceedings, but he set out to circle the village.

Vasya watched the cold lump in her hand. Was that—? “Wait, Solovey.”

The horse halted. The wood in Vasya’s hand now had a faint red edge. She was sure of it. “That way,” she whispered.

Step. Another. Halt. The coal brightened, grew hotter. Vasya was glad of her heavy mitten. “Straight on,” Vasya said.

Slowly their pace increased, from walk to trot, to ground-skimming lope, as Vasya grew surer of her direction. It was a clear night, moon nearly full, but bitterly cold. Vasya refused to think of it. She blew on her hands, drew her cloak round her face, and followed the light determinedly.

She asked, “Can you carry me and three children?”

Solovey shook his mane dubiously. If they are none of them large, he replied. But even if I can carry them, what will you do then? These bandits will know where we’ve gone. What’s to prevent them from following?

“I don’t know,” Vasya admitted. “Let’s find them first.”

Brighter the coal glowed, as though to defy the darkness. It began to scorch her mitten, and Vasya was just thinking of scooping it into some snow to save her hand when Solovey skidded to a halt.

A fire twinkled between the trees.

Vasya swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. She dropped the coal and put a hand on the stallion’s neck. “Quietly,” she whispered, hoping she sounded braver than she felt.

The horse’s ears moved forward and back.

Vasya left Solovey in a stand of trees. Moving with all a forest-child’s care, she crept to the edge of a ring of firelight. Twelve men sat in the circle, talking. At first Vasya thought there was something wrong with her hearing. Then she realized that they were speaking in a tongue she did not know: the first time in all her life she’d heard one.

Their bound captives huddled in the middle. A stolen hen smoked and dripped over the flames, while a good-sized skin went back and forth. The men wore heavy quilted coats but had set aside their spiked helms. Leather caps lined in wool covered their heads; their well-kept weapons lay near to hand.

Vasya took a deep breath, thinking hard. They seemed like ordinary men, but what manner of bandit leaves no tracks? They might be even more dangerous than they looked.

It is hopeless, Vasya thought. There were too many of them. How had she ever imagined—? Her teeth sank into her lower lip.

The three children sat huddled together near the fire, dirty and frightened. The oldest was a girl of perhaps thirteen, the youngest little more than a baby, her cheeks tear-streaked. They were huddled close for warmth, but even from the undergrowth, Vasya could see them shiver.

Outside the ring of firelight, the trees swayed in the darkness. In the distance a wolf howled.

Vasya wriggled soundlessly away from the firelight and returned to Solovey. The stallion put his head around to nudge his nose against her chest. How to get the children away from the fire? Somewhere the wolves cried again. Solovey raised his head, hearing the distant yips, and Vasya was struck anew by the grace of his muscled neck, the lovely head and dark eye.

An idea came to her, wild and mad. Her breath caught, but she would not pause to think. “All right,” she said, breathless with terror and excitement. “I have a plan. Let’s go back to that yew tree.”

Solovey followed her to a great gnarled old yew they had passed near the trail. As he did, Vasya whispered into his ear.

THE MEN WERE EATING their stolen hen while the girls, spent, drooped against each other. Vasya had returned to her place in the undergrowth. She crouched in the snow, holding her breath.

Solovey, saddleless, stepped into the firelight. Muscle rippled in the stallion’s back and quarters; his barrel was deep as the vault of a church.

The men, as one, sprang to their feet.

The stallion slipped nearer the fire, ears pricked. Vasya hoped the bandits would think he was some boyar’s prize that had broken his rope and escaped.

Solovey tossed his head, playing the part. His ears swiveled toward the other horses. A mare neighed. He rumbled back.

One of the bandits had a little bread in his hand; he bent slowly, picked up a length of rope, and, making soothing noises, began walking toward the stallion. The other men fanned out to try to head the beast off.

Vasya bit back a laugh. The men were staring, enchanted as boys in springtime. Solovey was coy as any maiden. Twice a man got nearly close enough to lay a hand on the horse’s neck, but each time Solovey sidled away. Only a little way, though; never enough to make them give up hope.

Slowly, slowly the stallion was drawing the men away from the fire, from the captives, and from their horses.

Choosing her moment, Vasya crept noiselessly around to where the horses stood. She slipped among them, murmuring reassurance, hiding between their bodies. The eldest mare slanted a wary ear back at the newcomer.

“Wait,” Vasya whispered.

She bent with her knife and cut their picket. Two strokes, and the horses were all standing loose. Vasya darted back into the trees and loosed the long call of a hunting wolf.

Solovey reared with the others, shrilling in fright. In an instant the camp was a maelstrom of frightened beasts. Vasya yipped like a wolf-bitch and Solovey bolted. Most of the horses took off after him, and their fellows, reluctant to be left, followed. In an instant, they had all disappeared into the woods, and the camp was in an uproar. A man who was obviously the leader had to bellow to be heard over the din.

He roared out a word, and the shouting slowly died. Vasya lay flat in the snow, hidden in the bracken and the shadows, holding her breath. She had pulled the picket in that frantic moment of confusion, then ducked back into the woods. The horses’ hoofprints had obscured her footsteps. She was hoping no one would wonder how the horses had gotten loose so easily.

The leader snapped out a series of orders. The men murmured what sounded like assent, although one of them looked sour.

In five minutes, the camp was almost deserted, more easily than Vasya had been expecting. They are overconfident, she thought. Well they might be, since they leave no tracks.

One of the men—the sour one—had clearly been ordered to stay behind with the captives. He subsided sulkily onto a log.

Vasya wiped her sweating palms on her cloak and took a firmer grip on her dagger. Her stomach was a ball of ice. She had tried not to think about this part: what to do if there was a guard.

Rada’s face, hollow with grief, swam up before her eyes. Vasya set her jaw.

The lone bandit sat on a log with his back to her, throwing fir-cones into the fire. Vasya crept toward him.

The eldest of the captives saw her. The girl’s eyes widened, but Vasya had her finger on her lips and the girl bit back her cry. Three more steps, two— Not giving herself time to think, Vasya plunged the razor-sharp blade into the hollow at the base of the sentry’s skull.

Here, Morozko had said, putting an icy fingertip on her neck. Easier than cutting the throat, if you have a good blade.

It was easy. Her dagger slipped in like a sigh. The raider jerked once and then crumpled, blood leaking from the hole in his neck. Vasya pulled her dagger free and let him fall, a hand pressed to her mouth. She trembled in every limb. It was easy, she thought. It was…

For an instant a black-cloaked shadow seemed to pounce upon the corpse, but when she blinked it was gone, and there was only a body in the snow, and three terrified children gaping up at her. Her knife-hand was bloody; Vasya turned away and vomited, crouched in the trampled snow. She gave herself four breaths, then wiped her mouth and stood up, tasting bile. It was easy.

“It’s all right,” Vasya told the children, hearing her own voice ragged. “I’ll take you home. Just a moment.”

The men had left their bows by the fire. Vasya blessed her little ax, for it split their weapons like kindling. She spoiled everything she could see, then ripped their bundles open and flung the contents deep into the woods. Finally she threw snow on the fire and plunged the clearing into darkness.

She knelt by the huddled children. The smallest girl was weeping. Vasya could only imagine what her own face looked like, hooded in the moonlight. The girls moaned when they saw Vasya’s bloody knife.

“No,” said Vasya, trying not to frighten them. “I am going to use my knife to cut these ropes”—she reached for the tied hands of the oldest girl; the cord parted easily—“and then my horse and I are going to take you home. Are you Katya?” she added to the elder girl. “Your mother is waiting for you.”

Katya hesitated. Then she said to the smallest, without taking her eyes from Vasya, “It’s all right, Anyushka. I think he means to help us.”

The child said nothing, but she kept very still when Vasya cut the cord from her tiny wrists. Once they were all freed, Vasya stood up and sheathed her dagger.

“Come on,” she said. “My horse is waiting.”

Without a word, Katya picked up Anyushka. Vasya bent and scooped up the other child. They all slipped into the woods. The girls were clumsy with fatigue. From deeper in the forest came the sounds of the bandits shouting for their horses.

The path to the yew tree was longer than Vasya remembered. They could not move fast in the heavy snow. Her nerves stretched thinner and thinner waiting for a man to burst out of the undergrowth or stumble back into camp and raise the alarm.

The steps ticked by, the breaths and the heartbeats. Had they missed their way? Vasya’s arms ached. The moon dipped nearer the treetops, and monstrous shadows striped the snow.

Suddenly they heard a crashing in the snow-crusted bracken. The girls huddled in the deepest dark they could find.

Great, crunching steps. Now even Katya was gasping out sobs.

“Hush,” said Vasya. “Be still.”

When an enormous creature tore itself from the undergrowth, they all screamed.

“No,” said Vasya, relieved. “No, that is my horse; that is Solovey.” She went at once to the stallion’s side, pulled off a mitten, and buried her shaking fingers in his mane.

“He is the horse that came into camp,” said Katya slowly.

“Yes,” said Vasya, stroking Solovey’s neck. “Our trick to win your freedom.” A little warmth crept back into her hands, buried beneath his mane.

Tiny Anyushka, who stood barely higher than Solovey’s knee, teetered suddenly forward, though Katya tried to grab her back. “The magic horse is silver-gold,” Anyushka informed Vasya unexpectedly, hands on hips. She looked Solovey up and down. “This one can’t be a magic horse.”

“No?” Vasya asked the child, gently.

“No,” returned Anyushka. But then she stretched out a small, trembling hand.

“Anyushka!” gasped Katya. “That beast will—”

Solovey lowered his head, ears pricked in a friendly way.

Anyushka sprang back, wide-eyed. Solovey’s head was nearly bigger than she was. Then, tentatively, when Solovey did not move again, she raised clumsy fingers to pat his velvet nose. “Look, Katya,” she whispered. “He likes me. Even if he isn’t a magic horse.”

Vasya knelt beside the girl. “In the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful, there is a magic black horse—night’s guardian—that serves Baba Yaga,” she said. “Perhaps mine is a magic horse, or perhaps not. Would you like to ride him?”

Anyushka made no answer, but the other girls, emboldened, crept out into the moonlight. Vasya located her saddle and saddlebags and began rigging out Solovey.

But now they heard another creature moving in the undergrowth, this one two-footed. No—more than one, and those were the sounds of horses. The hairs on the back of Vasya’s neck rose. It was very dark now, except for a little fitful moonlight. Hurry, Vasya, Solovey said.

Vasya fumbled for the girth. The girls clustered around the horse, as though they could hide in his shadow. Vasya did up the girth not an instant too soon; the sounds of men shouting drew nearer and nearer.

For an instant Vasya’s throat seized in panic, remembering her last desperate flight. With trembling hands, she boosted the two littlest up onto Solovey’s withers. Nearer the voices came. She sprang up behind the children and reached an arm down for Katya. “Get up behind me,” Vasya said. “Hurry! And hold on.”

Katya took the proffered hand and half leaped, half scrambled up behind Vasya. Katya was still lying belly-down on the stallion’s haunch when the captain of the bandits loomed out of the dark, face gray in the moonlight, riding a tall mare bareback.

Under other circumstances Vasya would have laughed at the shock and outrage on his face.

The Tatar did not bother with words, but drove his mare forward, curved sword in one hand, teeth bared in startled rage. As he came, he shouted. Cries all around answered him. The captain’s sword caught the moonlight.

Solovey spun like a snapping wolf and launched himself away, just missing the downstroke of the sword. Vasya had a death-grip on the children; she leaned forward and trusted the horse. A second man loomed up, but the horse ran him down without slowing. Then they raced away into the darkness.

Vasya had often had cause to bless Solovey’s sure feet, but she had more cause than ever that night. The horse galloped into tree-filled darkness without swerve or hesitation. The sounds of pursuit fell behind. Vasya breathed again.

She drew the horse to a walk for a moment, to let them all breathe. “Get beneath my cloak, Katyusha,” Vasya said to the eldest girl. “You mustn’t freeze.”

Katya burrowed beneath Vasya’s wolfskin and clung, shivering.

Where to go? Where to go? Vasya had no notion now which way the village lay. Clouds had rolled in, cutting off the stars, and their headlong flight in the thick dark had confused even her. She asked the girls, but none of them had ever been so far from home.

“All right,” Vasya said. “We are going to have to go on—fast—for a few more hours, so that they can’t catch us. Then I will stop and build a fire. We’ll find your village tomorrow.”

None of the children objected; their teeth were chattering. Vasya unrolled her bedroll, wrapped the two smaller girls in it, and held them upright against her body. It wasn’t comfortable, for her or for Solovey, but it might keep them from freezing.

She gave them draughts of her precious honey-wine, a little bread, and some smoked fish. As they were eating, heavy hoofbeats sounded from the undergrowth, surprisingly near. “Solovey!” Vasya gasped.

Before the stallion could move, a black horse came out of the trees, bearing a pale-haired, star-eyed creature.

“You,” said Vasya, too taken aback to be polite. “Now?”

“Well met,” returned Midnight, as composedly as if they had met by chance at market. “This forest at midnight is no place for little girls. What have you been doing?”

Katya’s arms shook around Vasya’s waist. “Who are you talking to?” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid,” Vasya murmured back, hoping she was telling the truth. “We are fleeing pursuit,” she added to Midnight, coldly. “Perhaps you noticed.”

Midnight was smiling. “Has the world run dry of warriors?” she asked. “All out of brave lords? Are they sending out maidens these days to do the work of heroes?”

“There were no heroes,” said Vasya between her teeth. “There was only me. And Solovey.” Her heart was beating like a rabbit’s; she strained to hear sounds of pursuit.

“Well, you are brave enough at least,” said Midnight. Her starry eyes looked Vasya up and down, two lights in the shadow of her skin. “What do you mean to do now? They are cleverer riders than you think, the lord Chelubey’s people, and there are many of them.”

Lord—? “Ride fast until moonset, find shelter, build a fire, wait until morning, and double back toward their village,” said Vasya. “Do you have any better ideas? And why are you here, truly?”

Midnight’s smile took on a hard edge. “I was sent, as I said, and I am bound to obey.” A wicked gleam came into her eyes. “But, against my orders, I will give you some advice. Ride straight until dawn, always into the west—” She pointed. “There you will find succor.”

Vasya considered the wide smile. The chyert tossed back hair like clouds that cross the moon, and bore the regard easily.

“Can I trust you?” Vasya asked.

“Not really,” said Midnight. “But I do not see you getting better counsel.” She said that rather loudly, a hint of malice in her voice, as though she were expecting the forest to answer.

All was quiet except for the girls’ frightened breaths.

Vasya gathered her manners and bowed, a little perfunctorily. “Then I thank you.”

“Ride fast,” said Midnight. “Don’t look back.”

She and the black horse were gone, and the four girls were alone.

“What was that?” Katya whispered. “Why were you speaking to the night?”

“I don’t know,” said Vasya with grim honesty.

SO ON THEY RODE, west by the stars, as Midnight had bidden them, and Vasya prayed it was not all folly. Dunya’s tales had little good to say of the midnight-demon.

The night wore on, cruelly cold, despite the clouds rolling in. Vasya found herself shouting at the children, to keep them talking, moving, kicking, anything to keep them from freezing to death there on Solovey’s back.

She was sure the day would never come. I should have built a fire, she thought. I should have—

Dawn broke when she had almost given it up: a paling sky, snow-filled, but it brought, impossibly, the sound of hoofbeats. One young immortal horse, carrying four, it appeared, was not quite a match for skilled men who had ridden all night. Solovey leaped forward when he heard the hooves, ears against his head, but even he was beginning to tire. Vasya held the girls in a death-grip, and urged the horse on, but she almost despaired.

The tops of the black trees showed sharply against the dawn-lit sky, and suddenly Solovey said, I smell smoke.

Another burnt village, Vasya thought first. Or perhaps…A tidy gray spiral, almost invisible against the sky—that was not the black and reeking stuff of destruction. Sanctuary? Maybe. Katya lolled against her shoulder, beyond cold. Vasya knew that she must take the chance.

“That way,” she said to the horse.

Solovey lengthened his stride. Was that a bell-tower, over the trees? The little girls slumped in her grip. Vasya felt Katya behind her beginning to slip.

“Hold on,” she told them. They came to the edge of the trees. A bell-tower indeed, and a great bell tolling to shatter the winter morning. A walled monastery, with guards over the gate. Vasya hesitated, with the shadow of the forest falling on her back. But one of the children whimpered, like a kitten in the cold, and that decided her. She closed her legs about Solovey and the horse sprang forward.

“The gate! Let us in! They are coming!” she cried.

“Who are you, stranger?” returned a hooded head, poking over the monastery wall.

“Never mind that now!” Vasya shouted. “I went into their camp and brought these away”—she pointed at the girls—“and now they are behind me in a boiling fury. If you will not let me in, at least take these girls. Or are you not men of God?”

A second head, this one fair-haired, with no tonsure, poked up beside the first. “Let them in,” this man said, after a pause.

The gate-hinges wailed; Vasya gathered her courage and set her horse at the gap. She found herself in a wide-open space, with a chapel on her right, a scattering of outbuildings, and a great many people.

Solovey skidded to a halt. Vasya handed the girls down and then slid down the horse’s shoulder. “The children are freezing,” she said urgently. “They are frightened. They must be taken to the bathhouse at once—or the oven. They must be fed.”

“Never mind that,” said a new monk, striding forward. “Have you seen these bandits? Where—”

But then he stopped as though he’d walked into a wall. Next moment, Vasya felt the light coming to her face, and a jolt of pure joy. “Sasha!” she cried, but he interrupted.

“Mother of God, Vasya,” he said in tones of horror that brought her up short. “What are you doing here?”